Drawn tattoo design of two feathers, one in teal and one in purple, with black linework, dotwork and patterned detail on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feathers in blue and purple

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

The image shows two tall feathers side by side, each filled with intricate black linework, swirls and scattered dots. The left feather is shaded in turquoise and green, and the right feather in violet and purple. The feathers sit on a plain white background with small sprigs and stippled dots around their bases.

Dotwork Feather Dot Swirl Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had gone tacky on the left feather before Nell thought to blow on it, so the green cracked where her thumb had pressed. Her father's shop smelt of gum arabic and wet paper. Outside, the fen wind rattled the shutters, and the bell over the door had rung all morning for Michaelmas buyers, not one of whom wanted a painted goose quill.

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Tom Hallow had bet her a shilling that a drawn feather would never sell at the fair beside his pressed ones from the heron pens. She had worked through two candles on the violet one, scratching whorls with a steel nib until her wrist ached and every dot sat like a seed in a furrow. Her mother used to say a feather was a bird's letter to the sky, and Nell had wanted to write something the sky would read.

At the fair, Hallow's birds went for a penny each. Nobody stopped at hers until an old drover with a limp lifted the violet feather to the lamp and turned it slowly, tracing the braided edge with one cracked nail. 'That one's been flying,' he said. He bought the blue one too, for his granddaughter, and paid in coppers that smelt of horse.

Walking home, Nell found she had nothing in her hands but Hallow's shilling, still warm from his pocket. She sat down on the wall by the sluice and counted the coins twice, then a third time, because she could not believe the drover had got the better of her and left her the winning.