Pen line drawing on graph paper of a fern frond, several feather and frond designs, a swirl and a hummingbird head, suitable as fine line tattoo flash.

Fern fronds, feathers and hummingbird sketch

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on squared graph paper showing a fern frond at the top, a row of five tapering feather or frond designs below, a curling swirl on the right, and a hummingbird head in profile. The linework is fine and even, with feathery detail built from short strokes and small teardrop shapes on the fern. The image is black ink only, with the composition spread across the sheet as a set of separate motifs.

Fine line Botanical Fern Feather Frond Hummingbird Bird Swirl Sketch

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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 hummingbird had been drawn so many times on the back of the seed catalogue that Agnes could no longer tell which sketch was the first. Her brother Owen kept the nib pen in a tin that once held barley sugar, and he would not let her touch it after the afternoon she smudged the fern. "Ferns don't smudge," he said. "They're made of rules." He traced the teardrops along a frond with the tip of his little finger, counting them aloud, and the paper stuck to his knuckle where the ink had not yet dried.

Keep reading

Late August made the orchard smell of windfalls and wasps. Their grandmother's Bramley trees leaned over the wall, and every morning a hummingbird that should not have been in Kent came to the honeysuckle by the gate, flicking between the flowers like a stitch being pulled through cloth. Owen said it had blown off a ship. Agnes said it had flown from a painting in the church. They argued about it until the sun was low and the swifts began screaming over the rectory roof.

On the last evening Owen gave her the drawing with the swirl, the one curling like a fiddle scroll, and said it was the hummingbird's tail when it was tired. She folded it into her pinafore pocket. Next morning the honeysuckle was bare and the gate hung open, and on the wall lay one long grey feather, perfectly even along both edges, with a single drop of ink dried at its tip.