Hand-drawn rainbow feather with zentangle-style patterns in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow feather design

Colour · Flash

A single feather is drawn upright on white paper, with its quill as a dark line running from the base to the tip. Each section of the feather is filled with fine black linework in dots, swirls and repeated curved motifs, and the panels shift through red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. The design is centred and fills most of a tall, narrow frame.

Feather Rainbow Swirl Dot Quill

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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 lost property box at Thornbeck Junction has sat on the same shelf since the signal failure in March, and you are the one who has to empty it before the auction man arrives. Grey umbrellas. A child's wellington. Forty-odd phones that will never ring again. You lift each thing out and write it into the ledger in the careful hand your mother taught you, and you do not look at the platform clock, because the 16:12 to Carlisle has always been the one you miss.

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Near the bottom, pressed flat beneath a tartan blanket, is a single feather. It is longer than your forearm and shifts from red at the tip through orange and yellow, green, blue and violet down to a dark quill at the base. Someone has covered every panel in fine black ink, dots and swirls and ladders of curved lines, as if they could not bear a bare patch anywhere. The ledger has no column for a thing like this, so you write 'feather, one, rainbow' and feel slightly foolish.

Nobody claims it. The auction man laughs and tells you to keep it, the way you keep the one good mug in a cupboard. So you carry it home on the last train, folded inside your coat, and when you pin it above the kettle the whole kitchen seems to hum with weather.

Eleven days later a girl with ink on her knuckles stands at the counter and asks about a feather she left on the 16:12. She drew every stripe during a cancelled journey, she says, with a felt pen borrowed from her brother, and lost count somewhere in the greens. You unfold it on the counter between you. 'Four hundred and twelve swirls,' you tell her. 'I counted on the way home.' She laughs, and the train pulls out behind her, and for once you do not watch it go.