Black and grey realistic drawing of a feather curving diagonally across a pale background, with soft shading along its barbs and a fluffy base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded feather design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A single feather is drawn diagonally from the lower left to the upper right, with its quill running through the centre and its fluffy base at the lower left. The barbs are rendered with soft grey shading and fine dark strokes that give the feather volume and a realistic look. It is shown in black and grey against a plain pale background with no skin visible.

Realism Feather

Find an artist for this

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 apples had been coming down since the start of the month, and Mari Holt gathered them into baskets at the bottom of the orchard, where the wall met the brook. Her brother had gone over the hill for harvest wages and not come back. Every evening a grey heron stood in the shallows and watched her work, and every evening she told it to mind its own business.

Keep reading

On the last Sunday of August a feather came down out of a clear sky and landed in her basket among the Discovery apples. It was as long as her forearm, grey at the tip and dark along the spine, with a soft fluff at the base like thistledown. She turned it over in her hands. It was the kind of feather a crow leaves, or a pigeon, or a bird that has flown a long way, and she could not think which bird had lost it.

She carried it up to the cottage and stood it in the water jug on the sill. In the morning it had turned to face the window, though there was no draught. Her grandmother had always said a feather left in a house meant someone was on the road home. Mari thought this was foolish, and she left it where it was anyway.

On the third evening she heard boots on the lane. She did not go to the door. She went to the sill and found the jug dry, the feather lying on the boards by the step with its quill pointing down the path towards the orchard gate. She gathered the last of the apples into the basket, and she left the gate open.