Pen and ink drawing of two feathers in a dotwork and fine line style, one shaded in black and grey and the other filled with orange tones, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ornamental feathers in ink and orange

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

Two feathers are drawn side by side on a plain white background, one with black and grey blocks and the other with ornate inner patterns. The linework is fine and dense, built from curling lines, scallops and stippled dots. Solid orange and red wash sits in the centre of both feathers, with small sprigs and dots scattered around the quills.

Dotwork Fine line Feather Dot Leaves Pattern

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lamp, it has opinions. In the kingdom of Corrowmere, where the roads were paved with the names of rivers nobody remembered, there lived a royal scribe called Hesk who kept two quills in a brass box. One was grey, striped like rain on slate, plucked from a hunting hawk that never once came back to the same tower. The other was copper-red with a gold rim along its spine, and it had come from a bird no one at court had seen, only heard of from a drunk ferryman.

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Hesk wrote the king's decrees with the grey quill, because it was steady, and she wrote her own letters with the red, because it stayed warm when the palace went cold in the winter months. Every night she dipped them both in the same ink, black as a crow's eye, and every night the red one drank a little of the orange from the lamp and came out brighter. The grey one only grew sharper at the tip, the way a knife does when it is used for bread and nothing else.

One morning the king demanded a decree that would drown the eastern villages to save the western wells. Hesk sat with the grey quill over the parchment for an hour. Its tip hovered, then stopped. She set it down, took up the red one, and wrote the king a letter so full of curling lines and stippled sorrow that he had to read it twice, then a third time, and then he sent the ferryman to dig the wells instead.

When Hesk died the box was opened and both quills were found wrapped in a single cloth. The grey one had split down its spine. The red one was still damp at the nib, though its ink had dried a decade before, and nobody in Corrowmere has ever been able to say why.