A watercolour-style feather tattoo with blue, green and yellow washes on the inside of a forearm.

Watercolour feather on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A long black feather with fine, sketched barbs runs diagonally down the forearm, with a pale shaft and loose dark strokes at the tip. Behind it, blue, teal, green and yellow washes bleed outwards in soft, uneven blotches, with small ink droplets scattered near the base. The skin is pale and the photo is taken from a slight angle, with the feather filling most of the frame.

Forearm Feather Watercolour splash Wash Droplet

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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

The gull came down on the wheelhouse rail before the nets were even hauled, and you were the one who saw it, because you were the only one awake at four with the diesel still ticking. It stood with its grey back to the wind, eyeing the pile of gutted cod as if it were owed a share. When Cass shouted it off, it lifted in one slow, unbothered beat and left a single long feather spinning down onto the wet deck.

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Skipper Harrow said a feather on a boat was bad luck, so you didn't take it below. You pinned it to the bulkhead by the radio instead, where it could be seen. All week it gathered what a boat gathers: salt, a smear of bait, the blue paint Nell used to mark floats on the quay, the green of the oilskin by the door, and the yellow of the lamp that burned all night while the trawl went down into the dark. Each morning it looked a little more like it had been dipped in the sea and let go.

On the last night of the season the wind swung round and the crew ran for the harbour mouth under a sky the colour of bruised plums. You stood at the rail with the feather in your fist. Nobody was watching, and the bad luck already felt like a story someone had told you to keep you quiet, so you let it go. It skated out over the black water, caught the lamplight, and for a moment its barbs were blue and green and gold all at once.

Harrow never mentioned it again. The following spring, when the boats came back in, Nell painted a float the exact blue that had bled through the feather's black and hung it on the hook by your bunk without a word, which is how you knew the luck had held.