Colour traditional tattoo of a feather in red, orange, yellow and black with stippled shading, running along the forearm.

Traditional feather tattoo on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large feather runs diagonally down the forearm, with bold black outlines and a red central quill. Its vanes are filled with red, orange and yellow, with black accents and stippled dotwork shading. A scalloped border sits behind the upper section, and small curled details appear near the base.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Feather Plume

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 last matinee at the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Big Top had sold forty-one tickets, and Maud counted every one of them twice, because the box office boy had a habit of rounding up. She sat on an upturned crate behind the ring curtain with a tin of pins and a heap of ostrich plumes that had once belonged to the Parisian aerial act, now dead and gone to Spain. The vanes had gone brittle. Half the scarlet had bled into the cream.

Keep reading

Her mother had taught her that a feather should be mended from the quill outward, never the other way, or it would never lie straight again. So she worked from the spine, stitching barbs back into their hooks with silk thread the colour of marmalade, while the calliope wheezed through its last waltz on the far side of the canvas.

Outside, the elephants were being loaded for the last time. Ernesto, the ringmaster, came in with his hat in his hands and asked whether the plume for the finale would be ready. She said it would, because it was the only sure thing she had left to offer him. He studied the feather for a long moment, at the black outlines and the gold dots stippled along the vane like sparks in a grate, and said it was the finest thing they had ever carried.

When the tent came down that night, Maud rolled the feather in tissue and put it inside her coat. It was hers now, the only piece of the show that nobody had come to collect. On the train north she unwrapped it once, under the carriage lamp, and found the quill had gone red at the tip where she had pricked her thumb, which seemed right.