Blue, teal and pink watercolour-style feather tattoo running diagonally across the side of a thigh.

Watercolour feather on the side of the thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A long feather with fine black quill lines and layered blue, teal and violet barbs runs diagonally across the skin. Soft splashes of teal, yellow and pink fade out around the feather, giving a painted watercolour effect. The shading is smooth and the colour ink dominates the composition, with the feather centred on the frame.

Thigh Feather Splash

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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 dye-works on Tessaly Ring closed the spring the reservoirs turned grey, so when the Ministry asked for a true blue I had to go down to the sump and mix it myself. Nobody on the upper decks remembers what blue looked like. I do, from the one bird my grandmother kept in reed and copper wire, before the air filters failed for good.

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I paint the old way, on wet paper, letting the colour find its own edges. The teal I make by scraping algae off the lamp glass. Yellow comes from sulphur crust, pink from the cochineal beetles we keep in the hydroponic beds, crushed and steeped until they bleed. The feather goes down first, one long stroke, with the quill drawn after in black. Then the splashes, thrown loose, because the water decides where they land and I only decide where to stop.

The clerk came back at the end of the shift to collect it. He held the paper up to the light and said it was too pretty for the seed vault, which was the kindest thing anyone from the Ministry had ever said to me. He wanted it for the shuttle hull, to show the people below what they were coming back to. I told him the colour would fade within a year. He said that was fine. It only had to last until they arrived.

That night I rinsed my brushes in the sump, and the water ran down the drain blue and violet, into the tanks where the first fry had hatched that week. By morning the whole tank had taken on the colour of that wing, and the young fish were darting through it as if they had always known where they were going.