Black ink feather outline with purple and pink watercolour washes on white paper, a fine line tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Watercolour feather design

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A single feather is drawn in black ink with fine, flowing linework showing the central shaft and individual barbs. Loose purple and magenta watercolour washes sit behind the feather, with splatter and bleed at the edges. The feather is centred on a plain white sheet, with a wooden surface visible at the top corners.

Fine line Feather Watercolour

Find an artist for this

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

Fetch the kettle and sit where I can see your face, because this is a story for people with their hands busy. The spring the herring went strange, forty boats crept out of Newlyn and not one came back with a full hold. Old Ruan Penhallow stood on the slipway with his collar up and watched the gulls wheel over empty water, and that was when he found the feather. It lay on the wet stone, grey at the quill and then, where the last of the sunset caught it, bruised purple and rose at the edges, as if it had been dipped in the sky and forgotten.

Keep reading

He said nothing to his nephew, only pocketed it and rowed out at dusk with the tide running hard against the Mousehole rocks. The water went the colour of plums, then pink, then nothing at all, and still the shoal did not show. So Ruan took the feather from his oilskin and set it on the surface. It spun once, slow as a clock hand, and the shaft swung round until it pointed past the headland, straight as a mast. Dafydd laughed at him. Ruan did not laugh. He turned the tiller and followed it.

They found the fish in a black pool beyond the reef, so thick the nets groaned and the boat sat low to the gunwales. Hauling until their palms bled, they tipped the last of the catch into the hold, and when the light failed entirely Ruan saw the feather caught in the mesh, its barbs still faintly violet in the lamplight. He untangled it and laid it on the thwart.

Every autumn after, he sailed out alone and set the feather on the water, and every autumn it pointed him home. It went into the sea in the end, and that is why, when you walk the slipway at dusk, you may see colour bleeding out across the grey.