Gloved hands use a blue tattoo machine to ink a multicoloured feather outline on skin, with blue, yellow and green shading.

Feather tattoo being inked by gloved artist

Mixed · Photo

A tattooist wearing black gloves works on a feather design with a blue tattoo machine. The feather has a black outline with blue, green and yellow colour filling its plumes, and the work looks fresh. The shallow focus leaves the hands sharp and softens the skin and background.

Feather Tattoo machine

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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

The swell has been running since Ushant, and still you keep the needle steady, one hand braced on the cabin table while the lamp swings on its chain. Mr Pardew told you on the way out of Falmouth that a ship's cook does not get to be squeamish, and you have decided that a bosun's feather is no different from a potato peel. The gull's feather lies beside the ink pot, grey at the quill, pinned to the chart with a brass tack so it cannot roll away.

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You found it on the foredeck the morning after the storm, caught in the scupper grating with the sea still draining off it. Nobody else wanted it. Old Hanneke, who sails with the Dutch crew and reads weather from the colour of the sky, said a feather that survives a gale has earned its keep. So you dried it on the stove, traced its shape onto thin paper, and every night since you have added a little more blue, then green, then the yellow at the tip where the light catches it.

Tonight the lamp goes out in the middle of the last plume. You sit in the dark with the machine humming in your fist, counting the rolls of the sea, and you finish the line by touch, the way your mother taught you to sew. When the lamp is lit again the outline is clean and the colour sits true, and the only thing left to decide is whether the gull, somewhere over the Channel, has noticed it is missing a feather.