Black and grey pencil drawing of an ornately patterned rooster with flowing plume feathers and a decorated body, shown as a standalone tattoo design with no body placement.

Ornate rooster design in black and grey

Black and grey · Flash

A rooster in profile with a tall, curling plume and a head covered in intricate eye, beak and crest detail. The body and tail feathers are filled with dense patterns of scales, chevrons, arcs and hatched lines, with varied shading that gives depth. The drawing is rendered in graphite or pencil on a plain white background, with no body part or colour ink visible.

Rooster Bird Feather Plume

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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 cockerel at Hallow Cross had a plume like a wave going over, and he crowed at ten to five whether or not the line was open. Mrs Dunstan, who ran the refreshment hatch, swore he could tell a goods train from a passenger by the way its wheels hummed on the rails before anyone else heard it.

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The winter the snow buried the points, the 4.12 from Morrow did not come. Signalman Ezra Quill sent his boy along the cutting with a lantern, and the boy came back saying the rails had vanished under drift. Nobody on the platform wanted to say what they were all thinking, that the train was lost somewhere on the moor with forty passengers aboard. The cockerel stood on the bench by the ticket hatch, shook his scaled tail, and crowed anyway.

Quill, who had not slept, put his head out of the box and listened. The bird was not crowing at the sky. He faced the cutting with his neck stretched, and went on until his throat must have been raw. Quill had kept the signals for thirty years and had never once thought to trust a hen's son. He lit the red lamp and walked the line with the bird under his arm, ringing the handbell at every bend.

At twenty past six the engine came out of the white with its lamps like two dull coins. The passengers stepped down into the snow and blinked at the platform. Mrs Dunstan poured tea. Nobody gave the cockerel a name he did not already have, though Quill began calling him Signal from then on, and the bird strutted the platform each morning as though he had been the one to clear the line.