Black shaded feather tattoo with soft blue, pink and purple watercolour splashes behind it, placed on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather with watercolour splashes on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A single feather is drawn in black ink with fine outlines and soft grey shading along the barbs, and the quill curls up toward the top right. Loose blue, pink and purple watercolour washes sit behind and below the feather, fading into the skin. The tattoo is shown close up on a shoulder with a soft, slightly warm background.

Fine line Realism Shoulder Feather Watercolour Splash Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Hollins Tower had been broken since March, so Kit and I took the stairs to the eleventh floor every Saturday, counting the landings out loud to keep ourselves honest. Nobody else went up to the roof any more. The council had nailed the hatch shut in the summer, but the bolt had rusted through, and a gap the width of a hand was enough for two girls who had never been told no in a way that stuck.

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The pigeons up there belonged to Mr Sandhu on the ninth floor, or they had until his stroke, and they had moulted all over the gravel. I picked the feathers that were still whole. Mostly grey and speckled, but one long black quill had come off a bird nobody had seen in a month. Kit wanted it for a painting. She had brought the paints too, a biscuit tin of watercolour cakes lifted from the community art project in the stairwell, abandoned when the funding ran out and the murals stopped at the fourth floor.

On the way down the feather snagged on the rail and split along its spine. I panicked, but Kit took it off me, licked the tip, and laid it on a blue wash she'd made on the back of a Co-op receipt. Pink bled in from the edge where she had rinsed her brush in the lid of the tin. The black stayed sharp while the colours went soft, and the whole thing looked like it was still moving in a wind that wasn't blowing on the stairs.

She taped it to the landing window facing the car park, where the sun comes in around four. The pigeons came back the next week, cooing on the parapet as if nothing had happened, and the feather kept its place all summer, its quill curling toward a sky we could only see from the top floor.