Pencil drawing of a feather quill pen with curling barbs and an ornate scrolled handle, shown in black and grey on textured paper.

Quill pen design in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a feather quill with its plume sweeping diagonally upwards and curling barbs at the tip, ending in a metal nib at the bottom. The ornate handle is decorated with scrollwork and bands. The image uses fine pencil hatching and soft shading in black and grey on a textured off-white background.

Quill Feather Scrollwork

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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

Mrs Ada Pell had kept the Bellwether boarding house on the cliff road for twenty-two winters, and in all that time nobody had ever asked her to post a letter that wasn't already sealed. So when Mr Lowry came down to breakfast with ink on his cuff and asked for a pen, she handed him the good one from the sideboard drawer without a word, the one with the silver ferrule worked in vines, its feather gone the colour of weak tea from years of being handled.

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He wrote at the window table every morning after that, while the sea hammered the groyne below and the other lodgers argued over the tide tables. Ada dusted around him. She noticed he never blotted, only waited, and that the nib scratched when he pressed too hard, the way a gull scratches on slate. On the fifth morning he left the pen behind with a folded sheet tucked under the barrel, addressed to her in a hand so careful it looked borrowed.

She did not open it at once. She wiped the tables, carried up the coal, counted the spoons. Only when the house was quiet and the wind had dropped did she slide a thumb under the wax. Inside, he had written about the ferry he could see from his window, a ferry he had watched each morning and never once taken, and about a woman in Halifax who had kept a bookshop and had once lent him a quill that curled like this one. He asked whether Ada would mind if he stayed on past the end of the month, and whether the sea was always so loud.

She sat down at his table, dipped the pen, and wrote back: Stay as long as you like. The sea is always this loud. Then she tore the sheet in half, because it was not a thing to be posted, and folded the halves into her apron pocket where the good pen could find them in the morning.