Pencil sketch of an outstretched bird wing with layered feathers on a white background, a possible design for a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of a bird wing

Black and grey · Flash

A single bird wing is drawn in pencil on a plain white background, with the coverts at the left and the long primary feathers fanning out to the right. The outlines are fine and mostly unshaded, with a few light internal lines separating each feather. The image is in black and grey only, with a faint green tint along the leading edge.

Wing Feather Bird Sketch

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

The wagons are already creaking off the common when Mags tosses you the wing across the trestle and says it has to be on the Falcon by six or the whole ride stays behind in Marlow. It is heavier than it looks, a frame of ash with the feathers laid out in rows like shingles, and the leading edge has gone a faint verdigris where the copper wire runs under the paint. You sit on an upturned crate with the lamp hooked to the tent pole and start counting primaries, because counting is what your hands know when the rest of you is tired.

Keep reading

Eleven are there. The twelfth is gone, a long slim gap near the tip where the old sketch from the booking book still shows its shape in pencil. Whoever drew that sketch, a sign painter named Orrin Teale who died before the war, pressed hard along the outlines and lightly everywhere else, so the feathers seem to lift off the page. You trace his lines with your thumbnail. Then you find a spare quill in the tin of brass tacks, cut it to length, and fit it into the socket as though it had always belonged there.

Near four the rain starts drumming on the canvas and the generator coughs twice and holds. Mags comes in with two teas and looks at the wing for a long while without saying anything. She runs her finger along the new feather, then along the coverts, and she says nothing about whether the colour matches, which is how you know it does not quite, and she is pleased you did not pretend it does.

At six the Falcon swings out over the field with the wing mounted on its arm, catching the first grey light. Nobody on the ground can tell which feather is yours. You can, and you watch that spot each time it passes overhead, a single pale pencil line running beneath the paint like a seam you would only find if you were looking.