Black and grey fine line tattoo of an ornate feather with three small birds flying off it, on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate feather with three birds on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the side of the ribcage shows an ornate feather filled with mandala-style patterns, including dotted and curled motifs. Three small birds, drawn in solid black silhouette, trail from the tip of the feather towards the upper body. The fine, detailed linework contrasts with the plain, softly lit skin around it.

Fine line Ribs Feather Bird Swallow Mandala Ornamental pattern Floral motif

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

Every night before the bells of St Ann's, Mrs Odile Varga pulled the first loaves from the oven in a bakery at the bottom of Tanner's Row, and every night a grey feather lay on the sill above the proving trays, though no window in that street had ever been left open.

Keep reading

It was a long feather, the quill as thin as a bread-knife's edge, its vanes worked over with little rings and curls, and in the middle of it a flower the size of a thumbnail. The apprentice, a boy called Piers, wanted to sweep it away. Odile would not let him. She said that whoever left a feather on a baker's sill was paying for the bread in the only coin they had, and that a fair trade was owed.

So she kept it in a tin with the sugar-paper. In the first week of frost the birds came. Three of them, swallows or something like swallows, dropped out of the grey over the market and landed on the rope that held the shutters. They did not sing. They waited while she broke a heel of rye and laid it on the cobbles, then they took it in turns, crumb by crumb, until the sky went the colour of skimmed milk.

On the last morning of winter the feather was gone from the tin. In its place lay a single pinch of flour, shaped like a feather, perfectly even, and on the sill the three birds were already a long way up, flying east over the roofs, towards the sea where Odile had been born and had not gone back to in forty years. Piers said she should have followed them. She said she had already been paid, and went back to the ovens.