Colour traditional tattoo of a hand holding a bundle of feathers and rope across the stomach, with a candle and a portrait on the surrounding skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional feathers and hand on torso

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A large traditional-style tattoo shows a hand with a patterned red and yellow wristband gripping a bundle of dark feathers tied with rope, with small red drops beneath. A candle with a yellow halo and a partial female portrait on the arm sit to the left and right of the central design. Bold outlines and solid fills of red, yellow, green and grey ink dominate the composition across the bare torso.

Traditional Other Feather Hand Rope Candle Drop Portrait Headdress

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

Nobody in Carrow Vale trusts a messenger who arrives without feathers, so you leave the palace at dusk with the bundle gripped in your fist, seven black plumes bound at the quill with hemp rope. The Regent's seal is knotted into the cord. The red-and-ochre band on your forearm is the wristband every courier wears, woven by the widows of the salt road, and it chafes the same spot it has chafed for twenty years.

Keep reading

The road to the Ember Coast takes three days. On the first night you light a candle in a tin lantern at the crossroads shrine and watch its yellow halo spread across the stones, the way the old saying goes: a flame keeps the messenger honest. On the second night the rope begins to fray. A thorn-thread catches at your palm, and the drops that fall into the dust are darker than you expected, too dark for a scratch.

By the third morning the sea is grey below the cliffs, and you understand the feathers were never meant for the Regent. They were a debt, and the rope was the ledger that bound it. You untie the knot with your teeth, let the plumes go, and watch them skate out over the water like a flock that has finally remembered where it was flying.