Two photos of a watercolour-style feather tattoo with purple, pink and blue washes and black birds in flight, on an upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and birds on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large feather runs down the upper arm, its black quill and barbs outlined over soft purple, pink and turquoise wash-like shading. Small black bird silhouettes fly up and off the shoulder, with loose ink specks scattered along the edge of the colour. The two panels show the same arm from different angles, with a grey vest top and a plain background.

Upper arm Shoulder Feather Bird Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Pritchard lived on the twelfth floor of Carrow House, where the lift stank of wet pushchairs and the wind came through the stairwell as if it had somewhere better to be. Every evening the starlings gathered on the roof parapet opposite her window, hundreds of them, and then all at once they rose and turned over the car park as one dark thing. Her gran said the birds carried off whatever a family could not keep and dropped it in the canal before morning.

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The winter the gas was cut off, Nell climbed the stairs to the roof with a carrier bag and a question. She waited until the flock lifted. Caught in the railings was a single black feather, long as her forearm, its quill as thin as a bread knife. She took it home and put it in the biscuit tin with her gran's buttons, and that night she dreamed the feather was heavy with rain.

In the morning the tin was empty. On the windowsill lay a feather the colour of a bruise, violet at the root and pink at the tip, and the next day one like a kingfisher, and the day after that one the blue of the sea at Whitby. Each was dry and each was bigger than the last. Nell carried them down to the laundry where her mum worked and laid them on the counter, and the manager, who had said nothing kind since March, counted out the arrears in cash without being asked twice.

Nell kept the last feather, the turquoise one, folded inside her gran's tin. When the starlings rose over the car park that evening she lifted her hand to them, as if she had always known the trick of it.