Black and grey fine line tattoo of an ornamented feather with swirled detail on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental feather on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally across the skin, with its quill and barbs drawn in thin black outlines. The vanes are filled with hatched lines and scrolled, paisley-like patterns, and the tip curls at the right. The image is black and white, with the pale skin and soft dark background giving the design clear contrast.

Fine line Thigh Feather Swirl Ornament Quill

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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

Gather in closer, all of you. The rain has no respect for a story, but it falls on the telling just the same, so sit on the crates if you must. My grandmother sold feathers from a barrow on Cheapside, under an awning that leaked in four places, and she knew every bird by the way its feathers sat when they were wet.

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There was a man who came every Thursday for a single quill. He would not say what he wanted it for. He turned each one over in his fingers, hunting for a vane that would hold ink without bleeding, and every Thursday my grandmother sent him off with a handful of rubbish and a bad temper.

Then one morning in November, with the stalls shining like fish and the gutters running brown, he came without a coat and said, I have a letter to finish, and I cannot finish it with a crow's leavings. She saw that his hands were shaking. She went to the back of the barrow, where the good stock lay wrapped in oilcloth, and drew out one long grey pinion, curled at the tip like a fern in spring. Into its edge she pressed a little paisley of silver thread she had stitched for no one in particular.

He wrote the letter that night. What he wrote, nobody living knows. But the next Thursday he came back and did not buy anything. He only stood under the leaking awning and let the rain run off his hat, and he said, it reached her. My grandmother said, then it was a good feather, and went back to her counting.