Small fine line feather tattoo in soft pink, blue and yellow shading on the inner forearm.

Pastel feather on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single feather lies at a slight angle, drawn with fine dark brown linework along the shaft and barbs. Soft pink, blue and yellow washes fill the vanes, fading into the skin at the edges to give a watercolour effect. The design sits alone in the centre of the frame against plain pale skin and a light background.

Fine line Forearm Feather

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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

The pigeon came through the broken pane on the fourteenth floor the same week the lift gave up for good, and Mr Okafor from flat nine swore it was an omen. I told him omens were for people with nothing better to do. I was busy scraping flaking green paint off the stairwell rail with a butter knife, because the council had promised a painter for March and it was now June.

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The feather was caught in the cracks of the landing lino, pale grey with a blush of pink at the tip, its spine as thin as a hair. I put it in a jam jar on the windowsill, which is where I put everything I can't bring myself to throw away. Lily left a tin of watercolour cakes behind when she moved to Leeds at Easter, and they had sat in the drawer under the tea towels ever since. That evening I wet a brush from the kitchen tap and tried them on the feather's edges. Pink bled into the tip, blue crept along the centre, and yellow caught where the light fell. It took me three attempts to stop the colours running off the paper, and by then the kettle had boiled twice.

After that people kept stopping on the landing. The lift engineer wanted to know if it was real or a painting. The boy from flat nine asked if it could fly, and I said only if somebody gave it a reason. I pinned it to the window with a strip of masking tape, the way you'd hang a child's drawing, and the afternoon sun came through it onto the concrete wall of the stairwell.

By teatime there was a faint rose and gold shadow of that feather on the wall, three floors of brick leaning up into the light. Nobody mentioned the lift again.