Colour tattoo of a long feather with blue, green and yellow watercolour washes and black linework on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour feather on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A long feather runs diagonally up the forearm, with dark quill and fine black strokes defining the barbs. Soft blue, green and yellow washes bleed behind and through the feather, with scattered ink splatter dots near the base. The composition is vertical and centred on the arm, with the watercolour fading out at the edges.

Forearm Feather Watercolour Splash Splatter Quill

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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 parrot had been missing since Tuesday, and by Friday half of Harrowgate Bay had an opinion about where it had gone. Dilys Marsh, who kept the paint shop at the foot of Fore Street, was sure it had taken the Thursday ferry. Her nephew swore it was roosting in the chapel rafters, eating the hymn sheets. Dilys said nothing to either of them. She had found the feather on the wet cobbles outside her door that morning, and she had been turning it over ever since.

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It was as long as her forearm and dark at the quill, but the barbs had caught every colour in the street: cobalt at the tip, a green like new pea shoots down the middle, and a yellow so bright it looked lit from behind. She laid it across the counter beside a saucer of wet ultramarine and drew it through the wash. The pigment bled into the paper in soft clouds, just as the sky had bled over the harbour all week, and she left the feather there to dry in the shape of a question she could not answer.

On Saturday she knocked over the jar of yellow ochre. It burst across the floorboards in a fan of splatter, a dozen dots flung wide like the ones she had meant to add to the Co-op sign. Nobody would buy a sign that looked like an accident, so she knelt to scrub it. Then the back door banged, and something scrabbled across the lino. Green and gold came down from the kitchen beams and landed on her shoulder, claws stained yellow, and it said her name the way it had said it on Tuesday morning before it flew.

She let it stay. She pinned the feather above the counter where the window light could reach it, and she did not scrub the floor.