Healed tattoo of a black-lined feather on a forearm, with blue, purple and pink watercolour-style washes behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dark feather with fine black linework runs diagonally across the forearm, with its barbs drawn as thin, separated strokes. Soft washes of blue, violet and magenta bleed outward from the quill, giving a loose, painted effect. The composition is a long horizontal band across the arm, with the colour fading softly into the skin at the edges.

Forearm Feather Watercolour Splash Quill

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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 snow closed the pass on the Tuesday, and by Thursday the Rook's Cross inn had swallowed three carriers, a priest and a man with a tin box of watercolours he would not let anyone touch. You keep the ledger, so you are the one who asks his name. "Hollis," he says, and writes it in a hand so neat it looks stitched. Your mother says he pays in silver and to leave him be.

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He sits by the back window every afternoon while the light goes blue on the drifts. He does not paint the hills. He paints feathers, a dark one laid long across the page, then wets the brush and lets colour bleed out from the quill: violet, then a hot pink, then a blue that looks like the cold itself. On the Friday you bring his tea and find the page already dry, and beside it a jay's feather, grey-black and bent, which he has been pressing into the paint so the vanes come up barred and separate.

"For the post," he says when you ask. "There's a woman at Hallen who counts the days by the birds that come back." He folds the paper around the feather and hands you a coin for the courier who will take it when the road opens. You do not tell him the courier left at dawn on a sledge, or that the road below is still buried. You slide the parcel under the ledger, where the draughts cannot reach it, and keep the coin in your sleeve.