Ink and watercolour drawing of a feather in blue, green and yellow washes with black splatters on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour feather design

Mixed · Flash

A single feather drawn with fine dark linework, running diagonally from a bare quill at the top to a fringe of splattered black ink at the bottom. The barbs are shaded with sketchy strokes, and the vanes are filled with soft blue, teal, green and yellow watercolour washes. The plain white background leaves the design isolated on the page.

Feather Watercolour Splatter Quill Ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lost property box at Thornbury Junction has sat on the shelf since March, and nobody has come for what's in it, so on Tuesday you finally lift the lid and tip everything onto the counter. Umbrellas, a child's wellington, three phone chargers knotted like eels. At the bottom, wrapped in brown paper gone soft at the folds, is a single feather as long as your forearm.

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It isn't a pheasant's or a crow's. The vane is streaked with teal, and a green that turns to brass near the quill, as if someone dipped it in a puddle under the platform lamps and let the colour run. Ink has dried in a spray along the lower edge, black flecks like the soot that settles on the bridge rail every Monday. Someone has written on the paper in biro: platform four, 6.40, Saturday.

You know the 6.40. You have stood on platform four for eleven years, watching the Saturday crowd thin into the dark. A woman rang the office in April asking after a bird-watching notebook, and she never came back for that either. You wonder whether this is what she meant, whether she left it on the bench where the heater ticks, and whether anyone would think to look for something so light.

You write a tag, tie it to the quill with green string, and carry it out at 6.40 to the bench under the heater. The train comes in with its doors hissing open and shut. When the wind swings down the platform the feather lifts, turns once above the tracks, and goes off the edge into the last of the light, the blue and the gold catching it all the way down.