Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a black feather and flying birds with pink, yellow, blue and purple splashes on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Watercolour feather and birds on a shoulder blade

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A black feather runs diagonally across the upper back, with a flock of small black birds rising from its tip toward the shoulder. Behind the feather, soft splashes of pink, red, yellow, purple and blue suggest watercolour paint, with fine black linework defining the feather's barbs. The colour dominates the composition against plain, lightly lit skin and a dark background.

Shoulder Back Feather Bird Flock Watercolour splash

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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

Sit down by the radiator, it's the only warm thing on this landing and you'll want it for this one. No, don't bother with the lift, it's been broken since your mother was a girl. Carlow House, fourteenth floor, the flat with the blue door that never shut properly. A lad called Dev lived there, and one February he found a feather on the landing, long and black, the sort a crow drops and forgets.

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He carried it up to Mrs Okafor's, because she kept paints from her art college days, tins gone hard as boiled sweets. Pink, madder, a yellow like egg yolk, a blue like a swimming pool at dusk. She told him to wet the brush and let the colour go where it wanted. "Paint the weather around it," she said, "and the feather will find its own way across." So he splashed pink over the grey of the stairwell wall, then yellow, then purple where the damp had bloomed, and when he laid the feather across it, it looked as though it had dropped out of a sunset rather than a bird.

The next morning the starlings on the balcony rail went up all at once, and Dev swore one of them peeled off and went for the feather's tip as if it had been called. By the weekend there were a dozen more, black scraps climbing from the paper towards the window, and Mrs Okafor said the building had never looked so busy with birds.

They took the wall down when the council came in the spring, and the landing is a grey box now. But Dev still has the feather in a tin, and every so often he opens it and the colours come off on his fingers, like the weather hasn't finished with him yet.