Black fine line tattoo of two feathers on the inner forearm, close to the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feathers on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the inner forearm and wrist of a person whose face is not visible, with long brown hair falling beside the arm. Two black feathers are drawn in fine, detailed linework, with soft shading along the barbs and quills. The image is in natural light against a plain pale wall, with a white sleeve at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line 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 jackdaw had been picking at the guttering since March, and my father swore it was the same bird that stole his pipe tobacco, so when the two feathers came down through the open skylight onto the workbench, he held them up to the lamp like evidence. One was grey-barred and crooked. The other was black, long as my hand, its vane torn just above the tip where something had caught it.

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I wanted to keep them both. He said a feather was only worth something once it had been used, and took them to the pen-cutting table, where he had been trimming goose quills for the tallymen since before I was born. He split the black one's shaft with a penknife, quick and neat, and I watched the barbs fall away in soft curls onto the scrubbed pine.

Two sons had left that village for the Newfoundland boats, and each wrote home once a year on paper that smelled of salt. The letters came to our door, and my father was the only one who could read them aloud without his voice cracking. He would dip the new nib, tap the ink from it, and copy the names of the drowned into the parish ledger in a hand so steady it frightened me.

The last thing he made from those feathers was a single pen, the grey one, which he gave me with no instruction at all. I still have it. When I write to my brother, I hold it lightly, the way he showed me, and let the feather do the work it was always meant to do.