Realistic feather tattoo on the inner wrist, shaded in a rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.

Rainbow feather on a wrist

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single feather runs vertically across the inner wrist, with its quill pointing down towards the forearm. The barbs are drawn with fine, soft linework and gradual shading that gives the feather depth and a lifelike texture. Colour moves from pink and red at the tip through yellow and green to blue and purple at the base, against the plain skin tone of the wrist.

Realism Forearm Feather Rainbow Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harrow had been dyeing feathers for the Lantern Fair since March, and the order had come back wrong. Mrs Abney wanted a single pinion banded from crimson at the tip down to violet at the quill, the way the sky went over the Humber before a storm. Twice the vats had turned muddy, and twice Nell had scraped the feather clean and started again.

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"It's not a stripe," she told Tobias, her apprentice, who was twelve and believed every problem could be solved by pouring in more of something. She dipped the barbs one at a time, lifting each just far enough that the colour climbed the vane like water up a wick. "Look. Red first, then the orange bleeds in while the red is still wet. Stripes look painted. This has to look like it grew that way."

Tobias yawned. "Who's going to notice?"

"Somebody always does."

By nightfall the feather hung drying from a line above the stove, pink at the top and bluing towards the root. Nell sat with her tea going cold and watched it sway in the draught from the door. A grey pigeon came in through the open skylight, which it had never done before, and landed on the sill with its head cocked as if it were waiting to be paid.

She had meant to deliver the feather at dawn. Instead she took it down, still faintly tacky, and tied it to the pigeon's leg with a twist of green thread. The bird considered her, then flew off over the rooftops towards the river, the rainbow trailing behind it like a loose ribbon. When Nell lifted her hand from the sill, her wrist was dusted blue where the feather had brushed it.