Colour tattoo of a feather shaded in red, orange and yellow with dark linework, on a patch of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and orange feather tattoo

Colour · Photo

A single feather fills the frame, curving from upper left to lower right with its quill at the bottom. The feather is shaded with smooth blends from deep red through orange to yellow, with darker outlines and sharp barbs along one edge. Plain pale skin surrounds the design, and no body part is clearly identifiable.

Feather

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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 bonfire at the allotment was meant to be only leaves and bean haulm, but by four o'clock the smoke had gone the colour of weak tea and the hens were shut in early. You have been raking since noon, and Mrs Okafor's boy from number nine keeps asking whether the fire is allowed. You tell him it is, mostly.

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The feather comes down out of the smoke before you see the bird. It is as long as your forearm, red at the root, going to amber and then to a yellow so bright it looks lit from inside. It turns over twice above the compost heap and lands quill-first in the wet soil beside the rhubarb, its barbs still lifting in the heat off the fire. Nothing else in the garden is that colour except the fire itself, and the fire is three yards away, so you crouch and pick it up.

The quill is warm. Along one edge the barbs are sharp enough to catch on your glove, and along the other they lie smooth as wet slate. You think of your father's canary, the one that got out in 1987 and was never seen again, and you wonder whether it has been raiding the neighbours' feeders all this time. Then the wind swings round, the smoke folds over the fence, and the feather lifts from your palm as if it has remembered something.

You do not chase it. You let it go over the apple trees and the greenhouse roof, a small bright stroke against the grey, and when you look down your gloves are scorched at the fingertips and the bonfire has sunk to a single red eye. Mrs Okafor's boy is standing at the gate with his mouth open. "Did you see that?" he says. You say yes, and go back to raking.