Black and white photo of a forearm with a fine-line rainbow feather tattoo in pink, purple, blue, green and yellow strands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow feather on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single feather runs vertically down the arm, drawn with fine strands that curve outward from a central quill. Each strand is shaded in a different colour, moving from pink and purple through blue and green to yellow. The skin and dark background are shown in greyscale, so the coloured ink stands out clearly against the arm.

Fine line Forearm Feather Rainbow Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pit at Harrowgate Bottom had taken eleven men the winter the low shaft flooded, and after that the women kept the birds. Nell Ashworth kept the last of them, a grey hen with a torn wing that had come up from the coal face and never wanted to go back down. She fed it crumbs from the bread tin and talked to it while she mended socks, and it let her.

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In March the hen moulted and dropped a single feather on the pit-head step. It looked plain brown until Nell picked it up and the vanes caught the lamplight and split into colour, pink at the root, then purple, blue, green and yellow at the tip. Her brother Tom said it was the colour the dark had been keeping for them. The overman wanted it nailed above the lamp room door for luck. Nell put it in her cap instead.

In April the east roadway came down behind a fall of stone, and nine men were on the wrong side of it with the air going bad. Rescue crews tapped on the rock and heard nothing back. Nell went down the second shaft with the feather pinned under her cap, and where the roadway split she held it out in the draught. The strands leaned all one way, towards a crack no wider than a hand. The men dug there. They came out through it one at a time, coughing, and the last of them said the feather had pulled like a dog on a lead.

The overman counted the nine twice at the top, then asked for the feather. Nell told him it had gone back down with the hen, which was not quite true, because the hen had died that week in its box by the range, and she had buried it under the rhubarb. Some said the feather was still in the ground there. Others said it had flown off over the spoil heaps, shining, and that on dark evenings in Harrowgate you could see it turning above the winding gear.