Colourful feather tattoo on a forearm in teal, blue, green and pink with black linework and dotwork detail.

Colourful feather on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large feather runs down the forearm, with a central quill and layered vanes filled with teal, blue, green and pink. Black outlines and fine decorative lines, including scallop and dot patterns, add detail to the vanes, and small dots scatter around the feather. The person wears jeans and sneakers on a patterned tiled floor, and only the lower legs and feet are visible.

Neo-trad Dotwork Forearm Feather Dot 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

Tamsin Hale had sold ink from the tin-roofed stall at Gull Steps for thirty-one years, and in all that time no customer had asked for teal. They wanted black for contracts, brown for the ledgers, red for the chapel banns. So when the grey-haired stranger set a long feather on the counter, streaked green at the tip and blue at the root, she turned it over twice before she said anything.

Keep reading

"Where did you find this?" she asked.

"Where the tide leaves things," he said. "It needs writing with. Nothing ordinary will take it."

She filled a saucer with rainwater and a pinch of crushed mussel shell, the way her grandmother had taught her, and dipped the quill. The ink rose pink along the spine, then gold, then the blue of a kingfisher's back. Each stroke left a faint scallop on the card, like the edge of a wave folding over itself, and where the nib rested small round dots bloomed and spread, as if rain had started falling inside the paper.

He asked her to write the names of every boat that had gone out from Gull Steps and not come home. She wrote for three nights by the lamp, the Mary Ellen, the Constant Hope, the young Ruben Pryce on his first season, until the card was full and her wrist ached to the elbow. On the fourth morning the stranger was gone, and the feather with him, and the card lay square on the counter with its colours still wet.

At low water she carried it down to the harbour wall. The names lifted from the paper one by one, turned to small coloured dots, and drifted out over the flats towards the open sea, thinning like a flock that had finally found its way home.