Small fine line tattoo of a feather in black ink on the outer ankle of a leg against a dark background.

Fine line feather on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small feather is tattooed in black ink on the side of an ankle, angled diagonally with the quill running from lower right to upper left. The linework is thin and sketchy, with hatched strokes along the vane and a soft, feathered tuft at the base. The rest of the frame is a plain, dark backdrop with the skin lit softly.

Fine line Ankle 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

Pass me that goose, boy, and pull against the lie of it. Tear the skin and the captain sends the whole bird back to us with a face like vinegar.

Keep reading

The long feathers from the wing are the only ones worth keeping. They're stiff at the root, and the vane splits into fine hatched barbs that catch the lamp like frost on a rigging line. I've cut a nib from every goose that's come through this galley since Gravesend, and I've written every letter I owed with them. Forty-one letters to my brother Tom, who went out to the Carolinas and never once wrote back.

Last month the chandler's boy asked me why I bothered, if they never went anywhere. I told him the ink was the cheap part. A man can say to a page what he can't say across a table, and the page never looks away. So the letters went in the tin under the stove, because a stamp in Sunderland costs a shilling and that isn't the same as sending.

Tonight I'll keep this one. Hold it up to the porthole and see the tuft at the base, soft as a dandelion gone to seed, and the quill fine enough to write your name twice. Put it in your cap, boy, and when we dock you can carry it up the gangway for me, because my hands have had their last sharpening.