Close photo of a colourful feather tattoo with a rainbow gradient from red and yellow at the tip to green and blue at the base, outlined in dark grey, on the upper back near the shoulder.

Rainbow gradient feather on the upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A single feather runs diagonally across the skin, with a fine dark outline around the barbs and a grey shaft. The fill moves through a gradient from pink and red at the tip, through yellow and green, to blue at the base, with soft shading along the barbs. The skin fills most of the frame, and the edge of a grey garment is visible at the lower left.

Back Feather Rainbow Gradient

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jackdaws have been in the chapel again, and when you climb through the gap where the rose window used to be, the sill is littered with the grey and black scraps they have stolen from the ferns below. You sweep them off with the side of your boot. Only one feather is worth keeping this morning, a long one the colour of a bruise going out, and you pocket it before the wind can take it back down the hill.

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Your grandmother was the last glazier's widow in the valley. She used to say the broken window still knew how to make light, and that it only needed the right colours laid across its frame. Red at the top, she said, because that is where the sun comes first. Blue at the bottom, where the stones stay cold. She taught you to arrange anything that fell into the chapel in that order, and so you do, yellow after red, green after yellow, until the pieces run the length of the sill like a sunrise played backwards.

The storm comes over the ridge in the afternoon. The shutters you nailed up last winter rattle, and the chapel fills with a grey so thick you cannot see your own hands. You find the feather by touch, the shaft cool and smooth, and hold it up to the last thin strip of daylight through the crack in the north wall. The blue end takes the light and turns it to something close to fire.

Nothing in the chapel has been lit that way for forty years. You stand there until the rain stops, holding the feather up like a candle, and for once you do not try to mend anything.