Painterly tattoo of a feathered headdress in black, red, blue and yellow, with loose splashes of colour, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered headdress with paint splashes on upper back

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The tattoo shows a feathered headdress with large black feathers on the left and a red and white banded band with trailing black fringes on the right. The linework is loose and brushy, with soft grey wash and drips of red, blue and yellow running down through the design. The composition is asymmetric, with the headdress filling the centre of the frame and the colour splashes spreading beyond its outline.

Back Headdress Feather Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The backcloth had to be finished by Thursday, and Mr Hadley still couldn't decide whether the feathers should be black or the colour of a crow's wing in rain. I told him they were the same thing. He did not find this helpful, so I went back up the ladder with a size-twelve brush and a bucket of thinned black that smelt of turpentine and stale tea.

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The prop bonnet lay across two trestles in the wings, where the stagehands had left it after the matinee. Nobody wanted to move it, which was odd, since it was only card, paint and a length of old horsehair. Mrs Okafor from wardrobe said it had been in the building since the Festival of Britain and had survived two fires and a flooded cellar, and that was reason enough to leave it be. Its red bands had faded to the colour of weak tea, and the fringe hung like wet string.

On Wednesday night I was alone in the flies with a jar of cerulean and a jam jar of red, trying to make the scene look like weather. A drip ran off the brush and landed on the bonnet. Then another. By the time I noticed, the paint had sunk into the card and made a long bright stripe down the fringe that looked, under the work light, as if it had always been there.

I didn't scrub it off. In the morning Mr Hadley stood in the stalls with his hands in his coat pockets and said the splashes were the only honest thing in the whole production. He paid me the shilling he'd owed since spring, and the bonnet went back to its trestle, marked now, which seemed right. Sometimes I still watch rain run down a window and see those same two colours, arriving by accident and staying.