Black and grey script tattoo reading Stay Strong with a shaded feather, sitting on the upper chest near the shoulder.

Stay Strong script with feather on the chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a flowing script tattoo reading Stay Strong, with a shaded feather extending from the end of the lettering. The letters have dark outlines and soft grey shadowing that gives them depth, while the feather uses fine, feathered strokes and gradual grey tones. The composition is tightly framed on the upper chest and shoulder, with soft natural light and a plain skin background.

Lettering Chest Stay strong Script Feather Quote

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

You find the feather caught in the net the morning after the gale, tangled in tarred twine like a pen someone forgot to lift. Your mother says gulls don't shed like that in March, and you say nothing, because she has already gone back to the stove and the kettle is rattling its lid.

Keep reading

The slate hangs by the harbour steps where the lifeboat men chalk the tide times. Each morning somebody adds a line. Old Harry wrote "Mind the bar" last week, and Ruth Penhallow wrote her husband's name with a small cross beside it that nobody has rubbed out. You take the chalk from its string and write the two words you have been practising since your father's boat went out past the headland, the letters leaning over like masts in a swell. Under them you try to draw the feather. It comes out grey and wrong, more like a fishbone, and you leave it anyway.

By noon the wind has backed westward and the bell at the end of the pier starts up. You stand with the others at the wall, counting heads at the mouth of the bay, and nobody needs telling what a feather means on a day like this. Then the small boat comes round the point with its engine coughing and a man in orange waving one arm, and you run down the steps so fast the chalk snaps in your pocket. When you look back up at the slate, the tide has already started to lift the lower lines away, but your two words are still there, a little smudged where your sleeve brushed them, and the feather is still in your fist.