Black and grey ornamental scrollwork with feathers and leaves tattooed on a woman's forearm, running towards the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate scrollwork and feather forearm tattoo

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the outer forearm and wraps towards the elbow, with a central form surrounded by scrolling foliage, leaves and feathers. The linework is dark and detailed, with soft grey shading that gives the feathers and leaves depth. The subject is shown in a plain indoor setting, with the arm raised in the foreground and the rest of the figure partly out of frame.

Forearm Scrollwork Feather Leaves Ornament Foliage

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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 yourselves down, the pair of you, and mind the board by the door, it has never once kept a secret. You want to know why the ceiling rose in number four has leaves on it that nobody in Scarlow ever planted. I'll tell you, though you'll not sleep easy after.

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It was the winter the herring failed and the gulls came up the lane to squabble over the bins. We had a plasterer lodging with us then, a quiet man called Tobias Vane, who had worked acanthus into the cornices of half the hotels in Bournemouth before his chest went bad. He came to the sea to breathe. Each evening he came to supper with white dust in his moustache and a sketch folded in his waistcoat pocket, and in the scullery he worked the rose for number four, scroll after scroll, the fronds rising and folding over one another like something that wanted to be a wing.

He never finished it. He said the scrolls kept curling back the wrong way, and one morning a feather had pushed up through the centre that he had not carved. My father laughed and called it a gull's joke. Tobias did not laugh. He packed his chisels in the sea-chest, left the bucket of plaster set hard by the back door, and went off on the carrier's cart without his wages, saying only that the rose would finish itself if it was left alone.

Well, it did. Every spring after, my father swore there was another leaf on it, dark and fine as pencil, and every spring the plaster looked the same to me. I have stopped arguing. Go on up if you like. Mind the third stair, and if you hear a rustle in the ceiling, it is only the house settling its feathers.