Colour tattoo of a blue, teal and purple feather with dark shaded edges on the top of a foot, near the big toe.

Blue feather tattoo on a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally across the top of a foot, with the quill running from the lower left towards the upper right. The barbs are rendered with fine shading in teal, blue and violet, with dark outlines and shadowed edges that give the feather some depth. The plain beige carpet behind the foot keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Realism Other Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kingfisher would not come down to the mill pond after the hard frost, so Tom Ashby went up the weir to see why. He found the bird on the sluice gate, wings folded like a shut hymn book, and one long feather snagged in the reeds below. Nobody in Thorley Bridge had seen a feather that colour. It was teal at the root, blue along the vane, and where the low sun caught it the edges turned violet, like the inside of a mussel shell.

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He carried it home tucked in his cap. His mother said a thing like that was not for keeping, and sent him down the lane to Mrs Pryce at the vicarage, who had lived forty years in the parish and knew every bird by its call. Mrs Pryce turned the feather in the window light for a long time before she spoke. 'That is no kingfisher's,' she said. 'Kingfishers have nothing so grand. Somebody lost this on the water, and the water has been asking after it ever since.'

Tom walked the bank for three weeks with the feather inside his jersey, asking the lock keeper, the eel man and the girls at the laundry whether anyone was missing a bird. Nobody was. On the last Sunday of February he stood at the weir again and held it out over the current, feeling foolish, and the wind took it from his fingers and laid it flat on the surface. It floated downstream past the mill like a small boat.

That spring the kingfisher came back to the pond. Tom never told his mother he had let the feather go, and she never asked why the bird had stopped sulking. She only set her bread on the sill and said the river had its own ways of settling accounts.