Colour tattoo of a feather on a forearm, shaded in pink, purple and blue with small ink splatter dots around it.

Pink and blue feather on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally up the forearm, with a pale central shaft and soft strands drawn along its vane. The upper half is shaded in pink and violet, and the lower half fades into light and dark blue. Small dots of pink and blue spread around the edges, and the wash-like shading gives the design a watercolour effect against the skin.

Forearm Feather Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's wife in Mossgill had a vat of madder that would not take. Every bolt she lowered came up the colour of wet slate, and the wool smelled of nothing but river water. So when the crow-keeper's boy came down the lane with a grey feather tucked in his cap, she told him to hand it over and not stand about gawping.

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She dropped the quill into the vat and the water took it like a held breath. Pink rose up from the root first, a rose-coloured tide that climbed the shaft, and violet crept along the spine where the dye had been waiting. She fished it out with a forked stick and laid it on the flat stones to dry. By morning the lower vane had gone the blue of the North Sea before a storm, and a fine spray of colour had freckled the stones around it, as if someone had flicked a brush at the wall.

The boy wanted his feather back. She told him it belonged to the cloth now, and gave him a length of undyed linen for his trouble. He went home grumbling and came back at dusk with his mother's apron, stained the same blue, which had not come out in forty years of washing and never would.

Mossgill still sells that cloth. Nobody in the valley will say where the dyer's wife found her second pot, only that the feather was never seen again. On still evenings the river below the mill runs a little pinker than it ought to.