Painterly colour tattoo of a feathered headdress with dripping black ink, placed on the upper arm.

Feathered headdress on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A feathered headdress with a small red and white motif at its centre, drawn in loose black, grey, red and turquoise strokes. The black feathers soften into grey and trail into dripping ink lines below, with watercolour-like red washes across the background. Colour ink sits alongside the black and grey shading, and the design fills the upper arm against a white t-shirt.

Upper arm Feather Headdress Drip

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire had snapped again by the time the dress rehearsal was called, so Maureen Tully sat on an upturned crate in the wardrobe room at the Palace Road Playhouse and stitched the spine of the headdress back on by lamplight. Forty goose quills, a dozen pheasant tails and one stubborn length of cane had been her whole week. The director wanted it black at the crown, falling away to smoke at the tips, and she had spent two evenings with black ink and a size-four brush working the grey in by hand.

Keep reading

The red was the trouble. Stage blood would have looked cheap, so she had soaked a strip of old regimental flannel in madder and let it bleed into the base of the quills until the colour seemed to run down them of its own accord. Denis, the stage manager, came in with cold tea and asked whether the thing was meant to drip. She said it was meant to look as though it had been out in the weather, which was true enough, and which he seemed willing to accept.

At half past seven the call came up the stairs. Maureen carried the headdress down the back corridor in a hatbox, its turquoise braid catching the light from the fire door, and she felt a bead of dye land cold against her wrist as she went. In the wings the actor who would wear it stood waiting with his arms folded, and when he turned she saw the ink had already started to mark the cuff of her cardigan.

She didn't wipe it off. A stain was a sort of signature, she reckoned, and the theatre had had worse on its costumes. By the interval the cardigan was blue at the wrist, and the headdress had survived two nights without a single quill coming loose, which was more than could be said for the director's hairline.