Colour tattoo of a long feather with blue, green and yellow watercolour splashes on the inner forearm of a person wearing denim.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A long dark feather with fine black linework runs diagonally up the forearm, with soft blue, green and yellow washes spreading behind its upper half. The feather's barbs are shaded with thin strokes, and small droplet marks sit around the splashes and near the tip. The photograph is taken at an angle with a denim-clad leg and a grey pavement in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

Keep reading

The rain came in off the estuary at eleven and has not let up since, so I have pulled the tarpaulin tight over the paint trestle and am writing this on the back of a cardboard price list. Mr Okonedo from the fish stall lent me his lamp. You will laugh, but the gull that came down on the bins this morning left me a feather, long and dark and still wet at the tip, and I have had it pinned to the corner of the awning all day as a joke.

Then the thing happened that I want to tell you about. A boy from the flower stall knocked a jar of blue wash off the table and it went across the flagstones in a splash, straight up the side of my board. I stood there swearing at it until I saw how it had spread. It looked like a sky breaking open behind something dark. So I took the feather down, dipped the quill end in the green and the ochre, and pressed it to the wet paper, and the colour bled outward as if it wanted to leave its own shape behind.

Mrs Calloway bought the print for two pounds and said it looked like a feather somebody had dropped in a storm and then forgotten to be sad about. I did not tell her the splashes were an accident. I think the best things on this stall have all been accidents.

Write soon, and tell me whether the sea is as grey over there as it is here. Pin something of yours to your own awning and see what the weather does with it.

Love, Meg

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