Blue and black feather tattoo with dark splatter dots running up the forearm.

Blue feather with ink splatter on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A single feather runs vertically down the forearm, with a pale central quill and layered barbs shaded in dark navy, black and bright blue. Loose black and blue dots and soft washes spray upward from the top of the feather, giving a splattered, watercolour-like effect. The design is centred on the forearm against a plain background of tiled brickwork.

Forearm Feather Splatter Dot Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The feather was caught under the wiper when Dara pulled into the lay-by at Sallow Wells, forty miles past the last working pump. It was long and blue, bright at the root and nearly black along the spine, and someone had flicked a spray of ink across the air above it, as if a pen had been shaken over the desert and left to fall.

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Her father had painted shop signs in Doncaster for thirty years, and he used to say blue was the hardest colour to keep still. Blue ran, he said, the way water did, and you had to catch it before it spread. Dara thought about that while the heat rose off the tarmac in sheets. The road ran straight to the horizon with nothing on it but a telegraph line that sagged, rose and sagged again.

At the depot in Harrow Flats the clerk, a lad with a burn scar on one thumb, looked at the feather and then at her. 'Crow would be black,' he said. 'That's a jay, or something that's been somewhere it shouldn't.' She did not argue. She carried it back to the cab and laid it flat on the dashboard, where the ink spray caught the light from the windscreen.

That night she parked where the stars came down close to the bonnet and wound the window open. The wind came in, lifted the feather off the dash and turned it once over the seat before carrying it out into the dark. She watched the pale quill vanish against the sand, and for a while she could still see faint blue specks drifting after it, like something spilled and going on without her.