Colour realism tattoo of a feather in blue, green, purple and pink on the side of a torso, with small coloured birds rising towards the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Multicoloured feather and birds on the side

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A shaded feather in blue, teal, green, purple and pink curves diagonally across the side of the abdomen, with its quill tapering towards the hip. A trail of small coloured bird silhouettes rises from the feather up towards the ribcage. The colour is vivid and the feather is shaded to show its barbs, and the image is framed close on the torso with a navel piercing and a pink patterned waistband visible.

Realism Ribs Feather Bird Swallow

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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

You find the feather first, caught in the rosemary by the back wall, and you do not pick it up straight away because it is still moving. Not blowing, moving, the way a thing moves when something is inside it deciding whether to leave. The barbs are blue at the root and go teal, then green, then a purple that looks like bruised plum in the low light, and a thin stripe of pink runs down the spine as if someone drew it there in a hurry. Your grandmother always said feathers from the garden were bad luck to keep indoors. You put it in your pocket anyway.

Keep reading

By supper the pocket is empty and the kitchen window is open. The house is quiet except for a sound like someone turning pages very fast, and when you go out onto the back step the sky above the apple tree is full of small birds, each one a colour that does not appear in nature: sea-green, plum, a pink like the inside of a shell. They are not swallows, though they fly like swallows, low and sudden, dipping around the washing line as if they are checking the pegs for something they lost.

You stand there until the light goes. Then one bird peels off from the rest, circles twice, and lands on the step beside your bare foot. It is smaller than a thumbnail. Its tail is the blue of your feather. It looks up at you with a patience that feels borrowed, and then it lifts again, and you understand that it is only the feather's way of counting who is still in the garden. You step inside and leave the door open behind you.