Colour tattoo of feathers with orange and red accents and a black beaded band across the inner upper arm.

Feathers with a beaded band on the upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two long feathers hanging from a black woven band decorated with small red and orange beads. The feathers use bold black outlines and shaded black areas, with orange and red strokes along the shafts. The design sits on the upper arm against a plain background, with a white ribbed top visible on the right.

Traditional Upper arm Feather Bead Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The feathers came in a flour sack, forty-two of them, still smelling of the moor, and Mr Abney tipped them onto my bench as if he were emptying a sack of coal. Goose for the common shafts, he said. The two long dark ones were for the lady in Fulwood, who wanted her hunting arrows to fly true and look handsome doing it.

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I had been at that bench since I was nine and could tell a flight feather from a tail feather with my eyes shut. These two were dark as wet slate, with a scatter of rust and saffron along the vanes where some bird had preened in the sun. My mother had plaited a band of black cord for me the winter my father went under, threading red and amber glass beads along it the way she did with anything she meant to keep. I wore it on my upper arm to hold my sleeve back while I worked. Abney saw it and laughed and said I'd make a fine sight in a Sunday school pageant.

I did not fletch the lady's arrows that week. I sat with the two dark feathers under the lamp, trimming the quills with my good knife, and I bound them into a little fan with the cord from my own arm. The red beads knocked softly against the shafts when I moved.

On Saturday I walked up past the reservoir where the wind comes off the heather with nothing to stop it. I held the fan up, let go, and watched the feathers lift and turn over the water, black, then red, then gone.