Black tribal-patterned feather tattoo with a circular motif on the upper arm, with a small red star beside its lower tip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal feather tattoo on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large feather fills the upper arm, its quill running diagonally from top right to bottom left. Its surface is filled with black linework and solid patterns of swirls, chevrons and a central circular motif. A small red star sits near the lower tip of the feather, the only colour in the piece.

Geometric Upper arm Feather Tribal pattern Circle Star Swirl

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 bread was still warm when Maud reached the edge of Hollin Wood, and she had already decided not to look back at the village. Old Ansel Pike, who burned charcoal in the clearing, had told the children that the heron nesting in the blasted oak took a name for every step a child went past the third stile. Maud had heard it so often she no longer believed it, and she had come anyway, because his hands had been shaking all week and nobody else would carry his loaf.

Keep reading

On the path beyond the stile she found a feather lying across a root. It was long and grey, banded with black, and the vanes were patterned with swirls and small sharp chevrons, as if someone had worked them with a fine knife. The quill was dark as wet slate. Before she picked it up she noticed that the carved sun-wheel on the stile post, the one with the cross set inside its circle, had turned slightly, so that its arms pointed straight down the path toward the water.

The heron stood in the mere up to its knees. It did not look at the bread. It looked at her for a long time and said, in a voice like a gate that needed oil, that a name was owed for a feather. Maud gave it the loaf, which it did not eat, and then she offered her own name, which it refused. Instead it opened its bill and let fall a single red spark from Ansel's kiln, which had been burning all afternoon on the far side of the trees. The spark drifted down like a small star and settled on the water without going out.

Maud walked home by it. She pinned the feather above the cottage door, and in the evenings the draught moves it so the patterns catch the lamp. Ansel's kiln still smokes at the edge of the wood. Some nights, if she stands at the threshold and watches the stile, she can see the red point burning low among the trees, keeping the path for anyone who needs it.