Black and white photo of a fine line feather tattoo on the inner forearm, with the quill running down the centre and delicate barbs on either side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line feather on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of a single feather runs vertically along the forearm, with its quill down the centre and barbs drawn on either side. The shading is light and the linework is thin and even, with the feather rendered in lighter tones against the skin. The plain dark background keeps the focus on the arm and the feather, which sits in the centre of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Feather

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you don't remember Miss Pardoe's Latin room. Forty-one years on and I can still smell the chalk and the wet coats steaming on the radiators. I'll tell you about the feather, because nobody else here will.

Keep reading

It was a goose feather, grey at the tip and white at the root, and Tommy Hallam found it on the tarmac by the bike sheds the week of the Whitsun fair. He carried it in his blazer pocket like a bus ticket he wasn't allowed to lose. Every time Miss Pardoe turned to the blackboard he'd take it out and run his thumb up the middle, along the quill, and watch the barbs spring back into line on either side. Thumb up, barbs shut. Thumb down, barbs open. He said it was the only thing on this earth that always came back the way it went.

Then the fair came, and the rain came with it, and the dodgems went skidding across the playing field. A little girl from the infants got trapped under the carousel canopy when the poles gave way, and Tommy was the one who ran in and dragged her out by her coat. He came out with a broken wrist and no feather. Nobody ever found it, and I never asked him, though I wanted to.

So here's the bit you've all been waiting for. Last spring a woman rang the school office asking for the old register, and when she came in she had a drawing on card: one feather, fine as a hair, quill running straight down the middle. Under it she'd written Tommy's name. She'd got it from a man who wouldn't say where he'd seen it. The feather, she told the secretary, had never been lost at all. It had simply gone under the skin, the way a good thing does, and come back up where you could see it.