Pencil drawing of two feathers above a circle, with curving swoosh lines and scrolled foliage below, drawn as a possible tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of feathers, a ring and scrolls

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch shows two feathers or quills rising from the top of a central circle. Curved, tapering lines sweep out either side of the circle, and small scrolled leaf shapes sit at the base. The drawing uses shaded grey pencil strokes on the feathers and bold outlines elsewhere, on a plain pale background.

Feather Quill Circle Scroll Leaf 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 sawdust in the ring is cold before anyone else is awake, and you are the one who sweeps it. Mr Oddie's ledger sits open on the wagon trunk where he left it, its pages gone soft at the corners from the damp that gets into everything in the winter quarters outside Stockport. He wants the wages copied out fresh because the old sheets have run to blots. Two quills lie crossed in the inkpot, one plucked from the goose that died in March, one borrowed from the schoolroom and never returned.

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You write the names slowly. Tilly, who rides bareback and has not once fallen since she was nine. Lucan, who juggles knives and sings under his breath when he thinks no one can hear. Bram, the strongman, who went off to run a bakery in Leeds with his wages and a pie tin he would not explain. Each name costs more ink than the last, because the crowds have thinned to a few Saturday families and the big top leaks at the seam above the empty lion cage. The ledger wants a figure at the bottom, and there is no figure that makes the sum come right.

Mr Oddie comes in coughing, his coat still buttoned to the neck, and asks you to read the totals aloud. You do. He listens with his eyes shut. Then he tells you to draw the old circle on the back page, the one painted on the banner the year they played Blackpool, with its scrolled leaves at the foot and the long tapering lines sweeping out either side like a bow being drawn. You draw it freehand. When you are done he taps it with one yellowed finger and says it will do for the posters, and he signs his name under it.

After he has gone, you lift the nib and find a bead of ink has crept into the outline of the ring and stayed there, wet and bright, as if the circle had only just been closed.