Black ink drawing of a feather filled with floral, swirl and paisley patterns, shown as a design on plain paper with no body placement.

Ornate feather line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single feather is drawn in black ink on pale paper, running diagonally from the top right to the bottom centre. Its vane is filled with fine linework forming flowers, scrolls, paisley shapes and small dots, while the quill is a bold solid line. The image is monochrome with a plain background and no body part visible.

Botanical Feather Flower Paisley Swirl Dot 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

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because I'll not tell it quick. Old Hollis Penrose kept the light on Scarrow Head for thirty-one winters, and in all that time he never once wrote the log with a shop nib. He used a grey gull's primary he'd picked up on the cliff path the autumn his wife went into the ground, and he trimmed it with his penknife until it would take ink.

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His daughter Nell was the one who couldn't leave a blank thing alone. She sat on the stool by the paraffin store with a bottle of black ink and a pen, and she filled that feather from tip to quill. Flowers in the top third, five petals each, tiny as a fingernail. Swirls like the curl of a wave going back out. Paisley shapes that looked like seeds swelling in the sun. Dots everywhere, thick where the vane was strong and thin where it frayed. Hollis said it was a crime to hide such work on a thing that would only go back in the ink pot, and Nell said that was exactly why she'd done it.

In March the fog came down thick as wool, and the coal boat Marigold was making for the reef. Hollis couldn't sweep the beam through it, it just smeared into milk. So Nell took the feather, held it up before the lens, and let the lamp shine through every inked vane. The light broke into a thousand little lace shapes and threw them out over the water, the same pattern every time, flowers and dots lying over the reef. The skipper had been told by his father that the rocks lay where the dots bunched thickest. He steered for the gaps between them and came in with a full hold and no hull damage.

The feather is still in the log, if you ask the warden nicely. Hold it up to a lamp on a dark night and you'll see the flowers go across the sea like someone's handwriting. Now, who wants the last of the biscuits?