Two matching black and grey feather tattoos sit side by side on the inner side of two limbs, one angled left and one angled right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two matching feather tattoos side by side

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two feather tattoos are placed close together on the inner side of two limbs, one leaning to the left and the other to the right so they mirror each other. Both are drawn with bold black outlines and soft grey shading that shows the barbs and quill. The photograph is taken from above on a light knitted fabric, with the pair centred in the frame.

Other Feather Pair Matching Quill

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

Brother Anselm kept two goose quills in the cell above the scriptorium, one for the long hours and one for the corrections, because the old abbot had said a copyist who mends his errors with the same pen will mend nothing well. Each spring he plucked a new pair from the geese in the mill yard, and each spring the boy who swept the cloister asked him why.

Keep reading

The winter the river froze to the mill wheel, the boy, Tobin, came up the stairs with his hands blue and a letter from his mother in the village. She had gone down the valley to find work, and the letter said she would not be back before the thaw. Anselm read it aloud twice, because the boy could not read, and then he sat a long time with the quills in his lap.

"They lean the wrong way," Tobin said, looking at them.

"One leans left and one leans right," said Anselm. "A pen that leans the same way as its brother writes crooked. They must face each other to write true."

So he set the boy to copying the psalms, and the boy's letters came out leaning left, then right, then left again, until by Lent he could make a clean line with either hand. When the thaw came, his mother climbed the valley road with a sack of salt and found the two of them bent over one page, the boy's letters leaning one way and the old man's the other, with a line between them as straight as a rule.