Ink line drawing of two feathers with teal and pink watercolour washes, shown as a tattoo-style design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two feathers in ink and watercolour

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

Two detailed feathers are drawn side by side on white paper, one in teal and blue and the other in pink and red. Fine black linework builds up patterned barbs, swirls and scrolls, with stippled dots scattered around both feathers. The watercolour washes sit loosely over the ink, leaving areas of white paper showing, and a small red sprig appears beside the right-hand feather.

Fine line Dotwork Feather Dot Sprig Swirl

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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

Dear Marguerite, the tide tables pinned by the chart room door say we make Valparaiso on the eleventh, but the cook swears by the gulls, and this morning there were so many of them over the mainmast that the boy on watch counted forty and gave up. I have started keeping the feathers they drop. You would laugh at me. There is a whole tin of them now under my bunk, grey and brown and one thin white one from something that must have been very far out at sea.

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The old bosun, Hallam, saw me sorting them on the deck yesterday and said a feather is only a pen that has forgotten what it was for. I told him he was a poet, and he told me he was a Sussex man who had been at sea too long. Then he took the striped one I had kept back, the blue and green one with the dark scalloping, and held it to the light until the barbs fanned out like a comb. He said his mother once wrote every letter to him on paper thick enough to hold a watercolour, and that the ink ran wherever she had been crying. I did not know what to say, so I said nothing, and he gave it back.

I am sending this one with the packet from the agent, so you will find it folded inside. Keep it somewhere the damp cannot reach. When you read it, think of the little red sprig I painted beside the pink one, the way I always meant to finish the page before I went. I have not finished anything since I left. But the gulls are circling again, and I have a feeling we will raise land before the moon is full, and then I will have a proper ending to write you.