Pale blue and lavender feather tattoo with a dark outline on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather on an inner forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A feather is drawn with a dark outline, with its quill running diagonally across the forearm. The fill uses soft pale blue and lavender shading that fades toward the edges, with small dark strokes marking the barbs near the base. Warm light falls across the arm against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The feather came down onto the deck of the Mary Ellen the morning after the big flood, when the Trent was still brown and sulking under the bridge at Cromwell Lock. Old Tobias Hale found it caught in the coil of the tow rope, pale blue at the tip and going to lavender where the light got into it, and he held it up to the sun like a man checking a shilling for false metal. Nobody on the towpath had seen a bird that colour. Not a kingfisher, not a jay, nothing a body could name.

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His daughter Winifred said it was a gull's and he should throw it back in. He said a gull would have been ashamed to wear it. They argued about it all the way through the Stoke cut, and by the time we were tied up at Gunthorpe that night she had gone quiet and was sitting on the cabin step with her chin on her knees, turning the quill between two fingers.

In the morning the feather was gone from the rope. Winifred swore she had kept it in her coat, and her coat was hanging where she left it. We found it three days later, stuck to the fender by the lock gate, dry as a biscuit and not a drop of river on it. Tobias put it back in his pocket without a word. He never spoke of it again, but when the barge went up for scrapping he carried that feather ashore wrapped in his handkerchief, and I saw him hold it up to the water one last time before he let go.

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