Close-up of a small black fine line feather tattoo on the inner wrist, beside a gold bangle and a grey cord bracelet.

Fine line feather tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small feather is tattooed on the inner wrist, with a loop at the top and a tiny mark at the base, and a few lines of lettering run along the shaft. The linework is thin and dark, with little shading, and the ink is black against the skin. The frame is tightly cropped on a wooden surface, showing a gold bangle and a grey cord bracelet with gold beads beside the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Feather Script Cross

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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 keeper on Skerry Ness counted the gulls every morning, because his mother had told him that a bird which stops coming means a boat has stopped returning. In the spring of the bad winter a single grey feather came down on the lamp room sill, pale at the tip. When he turned it over, the quill had been written on in brown ink, four lines of letters crowded along the shaft, and a small cross had been pressed in at the base.

Keep reading

He could not read the hand, so he took it across the causeway to Mrs Anstruther at the post house. She held it to the window and read the words aloud slowly. Ada, keep the light. Tam is on the north reef. Come home by the cross. The cross was the wooden one on the headland where the drowned were laid, and Mrs Anstruther went quiet, because her own man had gone out past the reef in January and not come back.

They rowed out that night with the feather buttoned inside his coat. The fog lifted for them at the reef, and under a shelf of kelp they found a small boat turned keel up, with a tin box lashed beneath the thwart. Inside was a letter from Tam Gow, half finished, saying the current had taken his oars and he had written what he could on the only paper he owned, which was the back of a gull's feather he had pulled from his cap band.

The keeper kept the feather in the drawer by the lamp. Each night after he trimmed the wick he tilted it to the light and looked for a fresh mark on the quill, and he never found one. He took that as the sea keeping its side of the bargain, and he went on counting the gulls, which still came every morning.