Hand-drawn feather design in bright marker colours with swirls, leaves and orange flowers, shown on plain paper with no body placement.

Colourful marker feather design

Colour · Flash

A tall feather drawn in outline with pink, purple, blue, green and orange marker. Its vanes are filled with hatching, dots, scrolls and small flower motifs, and curling tendrils with leaves extend from the base. The design is centred on a pale background with no shading beyond the coloured fills.

Feather Swirl Flower Leaves Tendril Dot

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

Dear Nell, the galley stove has gone out again and Cook has blamed the boy, though I saw him feeding it lard last night. I am writing this on the back of the menu slate because the paper ran out in Valparaiso and nobody has thought to requisition more.

Keep reading

The thing you asked about, the feather. It came in off the rigging the morning we ran into the trade winds, a long grey quill from a gull that had been caught up in the mainsail and was too ragged to fly. Mr Pardoe wanted it thrown over, but I kept it, pressed it flat inside my Bible, and the next time we had a dry spell I coloured it with the inks from the purser's desk. Pink from the cochineal the cabin boy stole for his sums, purple from the bruise-coloured dye the sailmaker uses on canvas, green from the copper pot when I scraped it.

It looks foolish, I know. A ship's cook with a painted feather. But every line I drew on it was something I could do with my hands while the swell rolled the pans off their hooks. Little curls for the bread that would not rise, dots for the mess tins, tendrils creeping up from the base like the ivy on Grandmother's wall. When we raised the Cape at dawn, the whole crew went quiet, and I found I had drawn a small orange flower exactly where the land appeared.

I am sending it with this. Do not put it on the mantel with the others. Keep it in the drawer where the spoons go, and when the galley smells of burnt fat, remember there was once a feather that carried the sea in its colours.