Black ink feather tattoo on a forearm, filled with hatched and dotted ornamental patterns and two names in lettering.

Ornate feather with names on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall feather runs down the forearm with a central shaft and a fringe of barbs at the tip. Its panels are filled with hatching, stippled dots, zigzag bands and small star-like motifs, with two names in block lettering across the middle. The work is in black and grey ink on a soft-focus background of textured fabric.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Feather Name Lettering Geometric pattern Dot Star 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

The snow has sealed the pass since noon, and the last of the guests have gone up one by one, leaving you the register, the brass lamp and a draught slipping under the front door. You turn the pages back to October, when a woman with a satchel of pressed bracken signed in as Ada Penhallow and asked for the room that looks up towards the ridge. She paid in coins worn smooth and asked for nothing else except a pot of ink and the loan of your penknife.

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Three nights later she left a sheet of card on the desk. On it was a feather, grey barred with brown, its shaft running straight as a surveyor's line. She had worked the vanes into panels, hatching one, stippling dots along the next, drawing zigzags like the teeth of a saw and small stars where the barbs thinned out. Across the middle she had lettered two names in square capitals, one above the other. When you asked whose they were, she only said they were the people she meant to walk back down to, and she tapped the card twice as if that settled it.

Tonight the card is in the bottom drawer, under the spare keys, and the pass is still shut. At two o'clock someone knocks, three slow raps, and when you open the door there is nobody on the step, only a single feather lying on the packed snow, its tip fringed with frost. You pick it up. The shaft is warm, as if it has been held in a hand.

You carry it to the desk, open the register at the October page and find the blank line beneath Ada's name. You write the name that has come to you without asking, then the one beside it, and you leave the nib in the ink so the last letter stays wet for the morning.