Realism style tattoo of a feather in black, grey and cream shading on a forearm, set against a blurred green background.

Realistic feather on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally up the forearm, with its darker upper vane and quill in soft black and grey shading. The lower part fades into pale cream and beige with faint blue-grey and pink highlights. The soft, blended shading gives the feather a realistic, three-dimensional look against the plain skin.

Realism Forearm Feather Quill

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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

Mr Oakes had kept the feathers in a cigar box since before the war, each one pinned to card with a label in his neat hand. By August of 1956 the box was nearly full, and the one he could not place had sat on the counter of the Ashcombe post office for three days, wrapped in brown paper that had come from Plymouth with no return address.

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Mrs Dacre, who ran the counter, would not touch it. "Bad luck to open a parcel that isn't yours," she said, and went back to her stamps. So Edwin unfolded the paper himself after closing, one corner at a time, and found a single jay's wing feather lying on a bed of cotton wool. Its upper vane was dark and barred with a blue that caught the bulb, and its quill was as pale as a stalk of straw.

Nobody had written a word. He turned it over and thought of his brother, who had gone to sea in 1931 and sent postcards from ports nobody could pronounce. Their father used to call the jays the parish tax collectors, always taking and never paying. Edwin had laughed at that once, years ago, when it still seemed a joke.

That night he pinned the feather to card and wrote the label, then stopped with the pen above the paper. Beneath it, in smaller letters, he wrote "received, not sent." In the morning he put the brown paper back on the shelf, where it stayed until the cotton wool yellowed and someone finally came asking.