Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman's face with feathers and a pipe, covering a forearm.

Feathered portrait on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman wearing a feathered headdress, with her eyes shaded by dark fabric and a pipe held near her lips in one hand. Feathers fill the upper part of the forearm and fade into the skin toward the elbow. The work uses smooth, fine shading in greys and deep black, with a clear tonal range across the face and feathers.

Realism Forearm Feather Woman Portrait Headdress Pipe Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moulting season came early that year, and by the second week of September the gulls had stopped bothering the rooftops of Harrowmere, because every loft in the town was full of feathers. Nell Pardew sorted them by the window of the old net store, pulling the grey from the white and the brown from the black, while her uncle sat at the far end with a clay pipe and a lamp that never went out.

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She wore a strip of black linen tied over her eyes, as the Pardew women had since the bad winter when the sea took the herring boats and the widows began to cover their faces against the glare off the water. Nell did not need to see the feathers. She knew them by weight, by the give of their quills, and by the salt the sea left on them.

On the last night of the month a ship came up the channel without a light. Her uncle leaned out of the store, lit his pipe from the lamp, and held the bowl high so the glow showed through the smoke. Nell stood beside him and counted the puffs. Three short, one long, the signal her grandfather had taught the harbour boys. The ship turned. She heard its keel scrape the shingle shoal, then heard nothing at all, only the gulls rising off the roofs in a grey wave.

In the morning the feathers were still drying on the boards. Nell carried the best of them up to the church steps and laid them along the sill in a row, one for each boat the sea had kept. The wind took two. She let it.