Sepia photograph of a small fine line feather tattoo on the inner upper arm, with the arm resting across a light fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small feather tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sepia-toned photograph shows a bare arm resting across a pale cloth, with a small feather tattoo on the inner arm. The feather is drawn in thin, dark linework with light shading along its quill and vane. The soft, low-contrast framing places the tattoo near the centre-left of the image against a neutral background.

Fine line Upper arm 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 goose came down over the water meadow the morning my father died, and I picked up the feather it left on the bank because my hands needed something to do. It was grey at the tip and white at the base, and the quill was split where the bird had landed on stones. I kept it in my apron pocket all through the funeral, through the ham and the bread and the men from the mill standing about with their hats in their fists. When the house had emptied I took it out and turned it against the window. The light went through the vane in a thin, dark line, like a pencil sketch of a thing that wasn't quite there yet.

Keep reading

The forest at the top of Ashby Lane had always been where my father went when he wanted to think, and I had never gone with him. I went that week. The path was soft with needles and the beeches leaned in over it like they were listening. Near the old charcoal pit I found a second feather, lying across a root, and then a third caught on a bramble. Each one had the same narrow curve, as if something had brushed past at a run and shed what it could spare. I laid them in a row on my handkerchief and sat there until the light went copper.

I tell people now that the tattoo on my arm is for my father, and that is near enough true. What I do not tell them is that I went back to the forest every evening that month and left one feather on the same root, and that on the last night the root was bare and the path behind me had gone quiet, and I understood that whatever had been shedding them had finished, and so, in its way, had I.