Black ink drawing of a geometric feather design with hatched and stippled panels, shown on plain cream paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric feather design in black ink

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A feather drawn as a long diagonal quill, with its barbs divided into angular triangular panels. The panels are filled with parallel hatching, solid shapes and fine stippled dots, all in black ink. The feather sits centrally on an off-white paper background with no body or skin visible.

Geometric Dotwork Feather Quill Triangle Hatching Stippling Geometric shape

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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 gull hits the lantern glass at a quarter past four, and by the time you have climbed the iron stairs with the paraffin can the bird is lying on the gallery grating, one wing folded like a letter nobody finished. You do not touch it. You stand in the cold and watch the lens throw its slow white bars across the sea, and when the light comes round again it catches a feather lying loose against the rail.

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It is a long one, a primary, and someone has drawn it. Not with a brush but the way a surveyor draws a coastline: every barb divided into panels, each panel cut again into triangles, some hatched with lines so fine they seem to hum, some stippled until they go grey as slate. The quill is ruled straight as a sounding line. You turn it over under the lamp and think of the prisms in the lens, how each one is a set of angles built to bend whatever comes in toward a single point.

You keep it on the ledge beside the logbook. Each evening you dip the nib in the ink pot you use for the tide tables and write the weather in a hand that steadies as the months go: wind south-west, backing, visibility good to the Farnes. Mr Ogle from the Coastguard at Seahouses says the blow will break by Thursday. You write that in the margin too, beside the feather's careful shadow.

On Thursday the sea goes white and the rock shudders, and you sit up all night with the lamp turning and the feather pinned under the inkwell on the chart table. By morning the swell has dropped and a ship's boat is pulling in past the skerry. You count oars, and when the light comes off the glass you find you have been tracing the feather's outline on the back of the page with your thumb, panel by panel, all the way to the point.