Colour tattoo of a feather with blue, teal and red watercolour splashes on the upper arm, worn by a person in a blue top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour feather on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A feather is tattooed on the outer upper arm, with blue and teal strokes forming the quill and vanes. Red and pink splashes bleed out around the feather, giving a loose painterly effect. The arm fills the frame against a tiled floor, and the linework is soft with no hard outlines.

Upper arm Feather Watercolour splash Paint splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Partridge kept the back parlour at Gull's Rest for forty years, and she never let a guest hang washing in the window, yet every August she let Tobias Venn set up his easel there. He arrived off the Scarborough train with a tin box of watercolours, a cracked stool and a grey feather tucked behind his ear, and he told her it was the only thing the sea had ever handed back to him.

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That summer he tried to paint the heron that stood on the breakwater each evening, but the wind kept lifting his paper and slapping it against the sash. On the fourth night he flung the window wide to shout at the bird, the lamp went over, and a jar of teal ran across the floorboards like something alive. Mrs Partridge found him on his knees mopping it up with his shirt, laughing so hard he could not stand.

He went down to the cove the next morning to rinse his brushes in the tide. A sheet of his best paper slid off the rocks and out past the weed, and he waded after it to the knees, then the waist, then gave up and simply watched it turn to pulp. Something red came in on the swell in its place, a single pink-tipped quill caught in the shallows, and he dried it on his sleeve and carried it up the cliff path in his fist.

He left on the Saturday without his easel. Mrs Partridge kept it in the parlour until the damp got into the legs. Now, when the tide runs low at the end of August, the children paddle out to the rocks and swear the water is streaked with blue at one edge and rust at the other, and she tells them it is only Tobias, still trying to finish the picture.