Close photo of a red, orange and black feather tattoo with paint-like splashes on the side of a person's ribs, in a realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red feather tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally across the side of the ribs, with a central quill and fine barbs drawn in deep red, orange and near-black. Soft shading gives the feather depth and a sense of curl, and small splatters of red and black ink trail off toward the right edge. The photo is taken from the side at close range against a dark top and a tattoo studio background.

Realism Ribs Feather Splatter 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

The fox came down from the burnt hill the week the river froze, and Mabry Coyle's wife would not let him in the house. She stood in the doorway of the lambing shed with a lamp in one hand and a poker in the other, and the fox sat on the frozen step with its brush wrapped round its feet and looked at her the way a neighbour looks at a debt.

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Mabry had been up since four, dragging a ewe out of a ditch by her hind legs. He came round the side of the shed with the sack of meal on his shoulder and saw the fox, and saw the feather lying on the step beside it, long as his forearm, red at the root and going to smoke-black at the tip. The fox had been carrying it in its mouth. It set the feather down, very neatly, and went off up the bank without once looking back.

He picked it up. It was warm, the way a stone is warm after a day in the sun, though there was no sun and the ground was white to the fence posts. Mary took it from him and held it to the lamp, and the orange in the vanes moved like a fire behind a window. She said nothing about the fox. She said the ewe would live if he kept her in the straw, and he did, and she did.

The feather hung over the kitchen table until spring. Some mornings it had dropped a few flecks of red onto the oilcloth, and Mary swept them up and never once asked where they came from.