Pen and ink drawing of three ornate feathers filled with black linework, dots and coloured bands in pink, purple, orange and blue, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three patterned feathers in ink and colour

Mixed · Flash

Three feathers are drawn side by side on a white background, one angled to the left, one upright in the centre and one angled to the right. Each feather is filled with dense black linework, dots, chevrons and triangles, with bands of pink, purple, orange and blue added in places. Small sprigs and scattered dots sit beside the outer feathers, and the composition is balanced and evenly spaced.

Feather Dot Chevron Triangle Sprig Pattern

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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 man at the desk at Harrow Lane had three sheets of paper rolled inside a cardboard tube, and when I unrolled them the feathers seemed to rise off the card. Each one was drawn in black ink, every inch packed with chevrons, dots and little stepped triangles, and someone had dragged a few bands of pink, violet and orange across them with a careful hand. My supervisor, Dervla, glanced over and said it looked like a school project. The form only asked for goods, not for what the goods were for, so I wrote goods.

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He said his name was Tomas Ehrlich and that the drawings belonged to his sister, who had died in March. He wanted them to reach her daughter in Vell, the town on the far bank, where she had gone to live with an aunt. I checked the stamps, the dates and the paper weight. Nothing in the regulations covered grief. I asked him to hold each sheet flat while I photographed it, and when he lifted the upright feather, the lamp caught its centre band and I saw that the pattern ran down the quill like a path someone had walked many times.

The next morning I stamped the tube PASSED and ran my thumb along the edge of the centre sheet, where a pencil note sat in the margin in a looping hand: for Mira, the blue one is yours. I took the sheets to the post room myself, though it was not my job, and asked the clerk to send them by the afternoon van. I kept the sprig drawing for myself, folded into my notebook, because it was the only one with no triangles on it, and I wanted something in my life that did not need counting.