Colourful ornamental feather tattoo with black linework and dotwork shading on the side of a person's ribs, with a hand resting on the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate feather on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A long feather is tattooed diagonally on the side of the ribcage, filled with blue, yellow and green ink and outlined in black. Fine black linework and stippled dots create mandala-like patterns across the feather's vanes, with the lightest areas left as bare skin. The image is a close, slightly angled shot with a hand and a dark top at the upper edge of the frame.

Dotwork Fine line Ribs Feather Mandala Dot Swirl Ornament

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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 down, sit, the lamps are lit and the last tram has gone. You want the one about the feather? Everybody wants the feather. Forty years back there was a pigeon-keeper called Abel Quarrie who kept his birds on the roof of the Tannery Street baths, and he had a grey hen with a tail like a folded fan. Each dawn she went out over the canal and came home with something in her beak: a bit of thread, a button, once a brass key that opened nothing in the whole city.

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One wet November night a girl named Nell Ashdown came up the iron stairs with a shoebox under her coat. Inside was a single long flight feather, pale at the root, wrapped in the blue silk of a dead aunt's scarf. A gull had dropped it on the lamp-post outside the Co-op, she said, and she had carried it three streets because she could not bear to leave it on the pavement. Abel held it up to the lamp and saw that the barbs were stippled with tiny marks, as if someone had gone along each vane with a pin and a patient hand, making rings and whorls the colour of evening sea and lemon peel.

Nobody ever learned who made those marks. Abel swore the hen had done it herself, out over the water, and the canal had given her the glow of the sky to work with, which it keeps in the grooves of anything that falls in.

Next morning he tied the feather to the hen's leg and let her go. Nell watched from the towpath as the grey shape climbed over the gasworks, one pale stripe flickering in the early light, until the city folded her up like a fan and put her away.