Black ornamental feather tattoo with floral and swirl detailing on a forearm, resting on a paisley patterned bedspread.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental feather tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather is tattooed diagonally along the forearm, with its shaft running from the wrist towards the elbow. The feather is filled with solid black ink and fine interior linework forming scrolls, rosettes and scale-like patterns. A small swirl motif sits to the right of the feather, and the skin is set against a pale background and a brown paisley bedspread.

Blackwork Forearm Feather Ornamental pattern Swirl Floral motif Paisley

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

The fair came down in the rain, and by the time the last lorry had grumbled up the lane you were the only one still awake in Aunt Rhona's caravan, sorting brushes by size and pretending the paraffin smell did not make your eyes water. Her ledger lay open on the table, its corners gone soft from wet fingers. Nearly every page held a feather, drawn a dozen times in a dozen moods, and the simplest of them was the one she sold on the Ashbury field to anyone who asked nicely.

Keep reading

The next afternoon the stall was busy with the usual trade. A boy wanted a dragon and got a snake with ambitions. A man wanted his wife's name, and you told him to go and ask her. Then a girl in a paisley shawl set a torn ticket on the board, drew a feather on the back of it in biro, and asked whether you could make it look as if it had been growing for years. You told her a feather never grows, it only arrives. She laughed and said she would wait.

You worked the shaft first, the way Rhona had taught you, one unbroken line from quill to point, then the barbs like the ribs of a fan. Scrolls came next, curling inward like water finding a drain, and at the spine you set a rosette, a flower copied from the bowls in Rhona's kitchen. The swirl went beside it, small as a comma. The girl watched without blinking, and the queue behind her went quiet.

When the lamps came on at dusk you opened the ledger to check your work and found a page you had never noticed: a feather with one rosette left blank, and under it, in Rhona's crooked hand, the words for whoever comes next, do not finish it for them. You sat with that longer than you meant to. Then you dipped the finest brush, left the second rosette open just as she had, and watched the lamp gutter while the field outside went dark.