Two shaded black and grey feather tattoos on the forearms of two people resting on a wooden floor, one small and one larger, in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feather tattoos on forearms

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms rest side by side on a wooden floor, each showing a feather tattoo. The smaller feather sits on the upper arm and the larger one runs along the forearm of the lower arm, with fine barbs and soft grey shading. The ink is entirely black and grey, and a faint partial outline appears at the right edge of the frame.

Realism Forearm Feather

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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 first feather is lying across the stile at Ashcombe, where the lane gives up and becomes wood. You pick it up because its barbs are still zipped tight, which tells you the bird that lost it was not hurt, only careless with the moult. It is short and dark, grey at the tip, and you tuck it into your coat the way you would pocket a coin you did not expect to find.

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Maud Pell at the post office has been waiting for something like it for a month. She keeps a tin in the hollow of the big oak past the church, and every Thursday you carry letters between her and her nephew Edwin, who went to sea on a coal barque and writes in pencil that smudges in the wet. Nothing in the tin is ever posted. Maud says the wood is quicker, and you have never argued, because the oak has never once lost a letter.

Two days later, below the weir where the river runs brown after rain, you find the second feather. It is long, nearly the length of your forearm, and when you hold it to the light the grey fades to a pale edge like frost on a window. You lay the two side by side on the flat stone by the water. They do not match, not quite, but they are plainly kin, and you wonder which of them has been waiting for the other.

You take both to Maud. She turns the small one over, then the long one, and says nothing for so long that the kettle boils dry behind her. Then she slides them into the tin, shuts the lid, and carries it up the lane herself, which she has never once done in twenty years.