Black line drawing of an ornate feather filled with swirls, dots and flower motifs, with the words live free in script beneath it.

Ornate feather with live free script

Black and grey · Flash

A single feather fills the frame vertically, with its vane divided into panels of scrolls, dotted lines, scales, a large daisy-like flower and small rosettes. Beneath the feather, the words live free are written in a flowing hand-lettered script. The work is drawn in uniform black linework on a white background, with no shading and no colour.

Feather Flower Swirl Dot Script Pattern

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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

Mrs Pardoe said the lodger in room four owed us a fortnight and a clean tablecloth, and she was right on both counts. He had spent three evenings at the bay window of the breakfast room with a fine nib, scratching at a sketchbook while the gulls fought over the bins on Marine Terrace. He never looked up when I cleared his cup. He just kept working, tilting the book toward the lamp as though the page might wander off.

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On the Thursday his door stood open. The bed was made tight, the wardrobe empty, and the sketchbook lay face up on the sill. The last drawing was a feather, long as my forearm, its vane cut into panels like the glass in the pier pavilion. One panel held scrolls that curled like the ironwork on the bandstand. Another held a daisy the size of a saucer, and below it a row of rosettes, then dots running down the quill like spray off the breakwater. Beneath the whole thing, in looping letters that leaned toward the sea, he had written live free. Under the sketchbook was an envelope with the rent in it, counted twice, as he always counted.

Mrs Pardoe said there was no use crying over a man who tipped in farthings. I didn't cry. I took the sketchbook down to the scullery and traced that feather onto greaseproof paper, slowly, the way my father taught me to copy the specials board before the chalk rubbed out. Every dot took me a while.

I pinned the tracing above the hall mirror, where guests check their hats before they go out into the wind. Mrs Pardoe saw it on her way to the kettle and made a noise in her throat, but she didn't take it down. The next morning someone had added a pencilled gull at the top of the page, flying out of the feather's tip, and nobody in the house would admit to doing it.