Black and grey realism tattoo of a single feather, shaded in soft tones, sitting centrally on the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded feather tattoo on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single feather runs vertically down the centre of the upper back, with its quill tapering to a point near the middle of the frame. The barbs are rendered with fine, layered black and grey shading that gives the feather volume and a light-to-dark gradient along its length. The tattoo is shown in sharp focus against a plain skin background, with a faint pinkish flush around the design.

Realism Back 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 feather turns up on bench four at Hollin Cross the morning the last northbound is cancelled, pressed flat beneath a folded timetable as if someone meant to come back for it. You are the one who picks it up, because you are the one who always does. It is as long as your forearm, grey at the quill and black at the tips, and the barbs are shaded so carefully that the light seems to run down them the way rain runs down a window, lighter near the root and darker where the vane frays into separate threads.

Keep reading

Lost property has a shelf for things like this, between the umbrellas and a violin case nobody has claimed since 2009. You log it in the ledger under Miscellaneous and write FEATHER in capitals, then cross it out and write BIRD, because feather sounds like something a child would want and bird sounds like something somebody will ask about. Outside, the rain comes sideways off the moors and the departure board flicks its letters over to read DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED, as if it has run out of other words.

At four o'clock a woman in a yellow mac asks whether anything has been handed in. She describes a dog-eared paperback and a child's mitten, and when you shake your head she looks past you to the glass roof, where a wren has been darting in and out of the ironwork all week. You say nothing about the feather. It seems to belong to the roof more than to anyone waiting below.

When the line finally clears, you carry it out to platform four and wedge it into the gap of the old signal post, quill down, so the wind can take it when it wants. The lamp goes green. The feather lifts once, turns over the tracks as though it has decided on a direction, and is gone before the train pulls in.