Black and grey realism style tattoo of a feather angled diagonally across the lower abdomen and hip, with a hand holding a blue and purple waistband nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded feather tattoo on the hip

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey feather runs diagonally across the lower abdomen and hip, with fine barbs and soft gradients giving it a dimensional look. The skin is tanned and the torso is cropped at the midriff, with a hand holding the waistband of a purple and blue bikini bottom and stacked silver bracelets on the wrist. The plain, slightly blurred background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Realism Other Feather Plume Abdomen Bikini Bracelet

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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 letters from the high fells came tied to the leg of a grey heron named Orrin, and every one of them smelled of wet slate. I was the Queen's feather-keeper in Caddow, which meant I sorted the moulted plumes the birds left on the palace steps and decided which were fit to carry ink. Most were too ragged. The good ones I kept in a cedar box under the eastern window, where the afternoon light could fall across them.

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The summer the river froze early, a boy from the salt marshes brought me a single flight feather, long as my forearm, dark at the tip and pale along the quill. He said it had dropped onto his mother's roof. I knew it was no heron's. Herons do not moult in such a fine grade of smoke. When I asked where he had found it, he only pointed south, toward the country where the king had sent his hunters two winters before.

I wrote to the Queen that night and sealed the letter with a drop of wax and a thumb of cold water. Three days later the boy was gone, and so was Orrin. The feather stayed in my box. When I opened it at dusk, I found the quill had softened, as though something had been breathing on it all afternoon.

I carried it to the window and let go. The wind off the marsh took it over the wall, turning once, grey against grey sky, and then it was only a mark on the cloud. I have kept the box empty since. It is lighter than it was, and I find I do not mind.