Traditional style tattoo of a red and black feather with a small heart cut out of the vane, on the side of a foot or ankle.

Red feather with heart on ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A red feather is tattooed diagonally across the skin, with a bold black outline, a black central shaft and dark feathered edges. A small white heart sits within the feather's vane, formed by the untattooed skin. The red shading is solid and the image is lit with a warm, close-up focus on the tattoo.

Traditional Ankle Feather Heart

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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

Nobody on the Medway Reach had seen a red feather in forty years, so when the heron-bird came down on the causeway with one stuck through its ring, I knew before I opened the tube what kind of letter it carried. Red meant a runner from the old Admiralty towers, and a runner's feather was always pulled from the tail of the last bird she trained, a ritual Mother Ottoline insisted on long after anyone remembered why.

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The tube held a single sheet of salt-stiff paper. The hand was small and careful, the way people wrote when they expected strangers to read them. It said only that the sluice gates at Strood were open, that the water was climbing the channel faster than the old charts allowed, and that the runner had stopped at the third lock because her knee had gone. At the foot of the page, someone had drawn a heart inside a leaf of ink, pressing so hard the nib tore the paper.

I walked the causeway at dusk with the feather pinned inside my coat. The gates were open, just as the letter said, and the water was already over the lower steps. I found the runner sitting against the lock keeper's wall with one leg stretched out straight, and she laughed when she saw the feather, because she had tied its twin to the first bird I ever trained, and she had never once let me forget it.

We carried her back together in the rain. I still have the red quill. The heart she drew on that letter is the only part of any message I have ever kept.