Seven black and white feather line drawings, several filled with dotted, swirled and sun-like patterns, shown as possible blackwork tattoo designs with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seven ornamental and plain feather designs

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows seven feather drawings arranged on a white background, from plain feathers drawn with fine, flowing strokes to feathers filled with dense ornamental patterns of dots, swirls, small suns and diamond shapes. The linework is crisp and the designs use solid black ink and white space only. The composition is an even scatter of feathers at varied angles, typical of a tattoo flash sheet.

Blackwork Feather Ornamental pattern Mandala Swirl Dot Sun Diamond Line drawing

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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 down under the Bramley, the one with the crooked limb, and stop kicking the windfalls. Leave the wasps their wages. I'll tell you about the feathers, because August is when they come down, every year, the way the old pickers used to say the orchard was shedding its coats.

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There was a woman called Hester Vane who kept a biscuit tin full of them on the windowsill of the cider house. Some were plain, grey and brown, and some had been worked over with a fine nib until they looked like maps of a country nobody had visited. Dots, little suns, diamonds running up the quill. She said the patterned ones were the feathers that stayed. The plain ones were for the birds that went south and never came back to argue about the apples.

One summer the patterned feathers stopped turning up under the trees. Only the plain ones came, drifting in a line across the long grass towards the far wall, as though someone had been walking that way and dropping them as they went. Hester followed the trail for three evenings. On the third she found the last one caught on the barbed wire, and beneath it a gate with a sun scratched into its paint, and a dot for every nail.

So when you find a feather in the grass, turn it over and look at the spine. If the marks run all the way to the tip, somebody has been counting the days for you, and they're waiting on the other side of the wall. Now go and fetch the ladder before the light goes.