A feather drawn with black linework and blue and teal watercolour washes on a white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour feather design

Mixed · Flash

A single feather runs diagonally across the image, with its quill and barbs drawn in fine black lines. The barbs are filled with soft blue and teal washes that fade lighter towards the centre and the lower tip. The plain white background leaves the design isolated, with no skin or body part visible.

Feather Plume Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marisol Penhaligon had been sent to the reed beds at Scarrow Dyke to gather feathers, because the post office at Hollin Quay had run out of quills and the postmaster would not hear of goose. "Something with a bit of colour," he had said, "the lawyers want their letters to look like they mean it." She found a grey heron's plume snagged in the sedge, then a kingfisher-blue tail feather lying in the mud as though someone had dropped it on purpose.

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She walked back along the causeway as the tide turned, the feather tucked into her collar. The water had gone the colour of pewter. Past the boatyard, Old Tam was caulking the ferry's hull and grumbling at the gulls. The ferry was due at four, and the mail sack had to be on it, but the sack hung empty because nobody in Hollin Quay had written a word since the telegraph wire failed in March.

In the sorting room she trimmed the vane with a penknife. As she stripped the barbs, the colour came off on her thumb, that particular teal the dye-woman sold by the thimble. She wrote one line to her sister in Carrick: "The tide is out and the feathers are blue. Come home on the spring boat." She sealed it with wax and only then noticed the ink had been mixed from the same dye, so the words and the feather were the same colour.

At four the ferry pulled away with one letter in the sack. Tam lifted his cap from the stern. On the far bank a lamp flickered twice, which was how her sister had always said yes, and Marisol tucked the spare feather back into her collar and went home along the causeway before the water came in.