Fine line black tattoo of a single feather on the inner wrist of a pale arm, against a dark background.

Small feather on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single-line outline of a feather sits on the inner wrist of a pale arm, with the hand resting in front of a dark backdrop. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, so the feather is drawn in simple black contour with a few quill and vane details. The ink is the only colour in the frame, and the soft lighting and shallow focus keep attention on the small design.

Fine line Forearm Feather

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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 closer, the lamps are lying tonight, they always go out on a Tuesday and the gulls get loud about it. You want the story of the feather? Then mind the kettle. Old Agnes Crane kept a letter-writing booth under the iron arch at Lantern Row, where the trams stopped rattling after eleven and the only sound left was the river tugging at its moorings.

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Agnes wrote for people who could not, or would not, put their own hands to paper. Sailors' mothers, widows with bad eyes, a boy who wanted to tell his brother he was sorry and could not find the first word. She used a quill she cut herself from a gull's wing, the grey kind that came down on the cobbles after the fish market. She used to say a feather knows the weight of what it carries, and it never carries more than it can lift.

One November night a man came in with a letter he had written himself. It had been crossed out so many times the page looked like a fishing net. He asked her only to fold it and seal it. Agnes did not read it. She looked at his hands, which were shaking, and she dipped the quill and wrote one line at the bottom in her own careful script: Come home, the kettle's on. He read it, and sat down on the step, and cried like a man who had been carrying a sack of stones up a hill.

When he left the feather was lying on the sill, where it had come loose from the nib. Nobody ever saw him again, and the letter was gone with him. Agnes kept the quill in a tin on her shelf for thirty years. Now drink your tea before it goes cold, and mind the stairs going down. They are steeper than they look in the dark.