Black fine line tattoo of a geometric feather made of triangular facets, on the inner forearm, in a fine line style.

Geometric feather on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A feather is drawn in a geometric style, built from angular facets and triangles joined by thin, even black outlines. The linework is fine and consistent, with no shading, and the design is shown in one solid ink tone against pale skin. It sits centred on the forearm, with the feather's tip pointing down toward the wrist.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Feather Triangle Outline

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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 last goose on Harrow Deep died in the fourth winter of my apprenticeship, and the hydroponic bay smelled of wet straw for a week afterwards. Mother Ines let me keep one of its primaries. She said a feather was the only thing a bird left behind that still knew how to hold air, and I was twelve and thought that sounded like poetry.

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Thirty years on, I draw the star lanes for the drift survey by hand. The ship's own mapping engine rounds every corner it finds, so I work on cracked slate with a steel stylus, breaking each route into facets the way the feather breaks its vanes into hooked barbs. Every triangle has to close on itself or the lane will not hold under acceleration. Ines taught me that a feather never bends where it can turn a corner instead, and that is why the old birds rode storms that tore the sails off the first ships.

Then the debris field came in off the Kessler shelf, and the engine's smooth curves began to shiver. I sat in the chart room with the slate across my knees and drew the lattice again, one angled line at a time, until the course looked like a plucked quill laid flat on dark water. We threaded the field at eleven knots with a margin of a hand's width on either side.

When the green world finally swelled in the forward glass, Ines was dead and the goose was long gone, but the feather still sat in a glass box above my bunk. I pressed the slate against the glass and copied its outline one last time, so the lane we had flown would have a shape someone could follow home.