Metallic gold and silver feather designs, apparently temporary tattoos, on a woman's inner forearm and wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold and silver feathers on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Three feather designs sit on the inner forearm: one gold feather angled upwards near the wrist, one silver feather, and one gold and one silver feather lower down. The feathers have fine, detailed linework with a reflective metallic finish, and they look like temporary tattoos rather than permanent ink. The background is blurred, with layered necklaces and loose hair framing the upper part of the shot.

Forearm Feather Metallic Gold Temporary tattoo

Find an artist for this

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

Sit nearer, the lamp only lights one face at a time and yours is the one I want. Down by the canal in Salford, after the last tram had gone to its shed, a woman called Ada Pell kept a stall under a dripping railway arch. She sold feathers, but not real ones. She brushed gold leaf onto the vanes and pressed silver foil along the quills, and anyone who bought one could take it home, lay it on the inside of their wrist, and wear it for a week until the damp took it back.

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Ada had one rule. She would only sell a feather to someone carrying a message they could not say out loud. A dockworker's boy called Tomas came one February with a few coins and a question. His sister had gone south to Leeds and not written in two years. He wanted something that would travel. Ada chose the finest gold feather in the tin, breathed on it, and told him to press his lips to the quill and say the words once, quietly, the way you'd say a prayer you didn't believe in. He did. Then she gave him a silver one for the reply.

The arch flooded that spring and Ada's stall washed into the cut. Some say she never came out. What I know is that the feathers came loose from their tin and drifted down the water, and every one that touched the canal lit up for a breath before it sank. Tomas's sister, they say, stood on a bridge in Leeds that same week and felt a warm weight on her wrist, like a hand that had been holding hers a long time. If you ever find a feather on the towpath, gold or silver, don't wipe it clean. It isn't yours to keep. It is only on loan.