A hand drawing a multicoloured feather with watercolour splashes and small birds on white paper, a design that could suit a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured feather and birds design

Colour · Flash

A hand shades a large feather in purple, blue, green and pink, with fine hatched lines along the barbs and a dark quill tip at the base. Soft watercolour-style splashes in pink, blue, green and red surround the feather, with several black bird silhouettes flying upwards to the right. The feather runs diagonally across a plain white sheet, with the hand and pencil entering from the lower right.

Feather Bird Watercolour splashes Hand Pencil drawing

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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

Mabel Ogden had dyed feathers for the hat trade for thirty-one years, and she could tell a pheasant from a jay by smell alone. The last order came up Canal Street on a Tuesday in a tea chest, six hundred quills wrapped in brown paper, with a note from a milliner in London asking for the colours of a bruise going off and a sky coming in. She laughed at that and put the kettle on.

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She worked through the afternoon with her sleeves rolled, dipping each vane into violet, then a thread of teal, then a blush of rose that bled into the blue like water into blotting paper. Sparrows gathered on the sill to watch. Her husband Dennis, who had never once asked what the work was for, carried the drying rack out to the yard and said the wind had turned west.

When the sun dropped behind the gasworks she took the finest feather, a long grey-brown one from a heron, and laid it over the water bath. It would not take the dye. The barbs shrugged the colour off, and she swore at it, and then she saw that the colour had gone into the air instead, pink and green curling off the surface like steam. Six black birds lifted out of the mist above the vat and climbed the wrong way up the sky.

Dennis found her at the window at midnight with the kettle gone cold. They're not ours, she said. No, love, he said, and fetched her coat. In the morning the tea chest was gone from the step. The heron feather lay on the sill, violet at the tip and running to green at the quill, and under the stone that held it down was a card in a stranger's hand: Received. Keep the rest.