Colour neo-traditional feather tattoo with ornate patterns on the inner forearm, resting on a black leather chair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate colour feather on the forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large feather is tattooed along the inner forearm, with a dark outline and a central shaft running its length. The feather is filled with red, yellow, green and blue sections decorated with intricate dotted and paisley-like patterns and small floral motifs. The photograph is taken at close range against a dark leather surface, with the bright colours clearly visible.

Neo-trad Forearm Feather Paisley

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The weaver's daughter Ilse had been promised to the river since the spring her mother lost the second baby, so when the ferryman came up the lane with his oars over his shoulder she did not run. She took the blue thread from the dye-pots and the red from the madder vats, and she sat by the fire until the wool gave up its colours.

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The ferryman, whose name was Odo and whose boat had carried every living soul across the Kessel for forty years, watched her work without speaking. He had seen plenty of brides and plenty of widows and not many girls who measured out a feather the length of a forearm with a knotted cord. When she was done she held the thing up to the lamp. Every barb was there, every curl, and in each blade a little garden of dots and swirls and tiny five-petalled flowers, all of them yellow and green and red and the deep blue of deep water.

"That is no fit cloth for a crossing," Odo said. "The river takes what is grey and plain. It does not care for ornament."

"Then it can look at it and be ashamed," said Ilse, and she tied the feather to the oar-blade with the cord, and pushed off before he could argue.

They say the Kessel was calm that night. Odo rowed her out to the middle, where the current turns, and she stood in the bow with the lamp and the feather lifting and falling against the dark water. Nothing came up to meet her. When the boat finally touched the far bank, Odo found the feather still tied fast and bright, and the river had not taken a single thread of it.