Realistic red feather tattoo with a black shaft and soft grey shading on the inner upper arm, against a red backdrop.

Red feather on the inner upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A single feather is tattooed diagonally on the inner upper arm, with a thin black shaft running up its centre. The red barbs are shaded with darker red and black toward the base and lighter highlights along the edges, giving the feather volume. The tattoo sits centrally on the arm against a plain red background and a navy top.

Realism Upper arm 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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the coal. You want to know where the red feather came from, the one Walter Pask kept in his waistcoat pocket until the day they buried him. Well. It came off a bird that wasn't a bird at all, not to begin with.

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It was the summer the Harrow Wick fair blew down, nineteen fifty-one. A travelling man called Ansel Crouch pitched his tent on the common with a cage of red-throated parrots and a board that promised they could tell your fortune in your dead mother's voice. Most of the village went to laugh. Walter went to buy a ha'penny's worth of luck and came away with a feather the length of his hand, still warm from the cage. Ansel said it had dropped from the one bird that would never sing again. Walter laughed and said he'd believe it when the thing flew.

It never flew. It lay in the Pask kitchen drawer for three winters, and every time the wind got down the chimney the drawer rattled, and Maud Pask would say, that's your feather wanting out. Then the spring the river rose, Walter went down to the lock with a lantern to fetch the Hendry boy out of the water. He got him. He also came back soaked to the bone with the feather stuck to his palm, and that feather, I'm telling you true, was dry as a biscuit.

Walter never said what he saw down there. The next time the travelling tattooist came through, he had the feather inked on the inside of his arm, just above the elbow, with a black shaft running up the middle like a line of ink drawn with a steady hand. He said that was where it belonged. Nobody argued. You don't argue with a man who has pulled a boy out of the Harrow.