Colour tattoo of a feather with purple, pink and blue watercolour washes and black birds flying off the top, on the upper arm.

Watercolour feather with birds on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A long feather runs down the outer upper arm, with a dark central shaft and fine barbs. Its vanes are filled with loose purple, pink and blue washes that fade into splatter at the edges, and a flock of black silhouetted birds rises from the top of the feather toward the shoulder. The photograph is taken from the side against a plain, slightly blurred background.

Upper arm Feather Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of September the big top at Hollin Green had gone soft at the seams, and you were the only one still up to fix the rigging. Dad's old tin of paints sat on the step of the ghost train, lids crusted, and you were stirring purple into a saucer of water because the gallopers needed their manes touched up before the Saturday crowd came in from the estates.

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Your brother Cal said the birds were a waste of time. Nobody looks at a bird on a horse, he said, they look at the horse. But you had painted a single crow on the shutter of the candy floss van that spring, and a woman from the next village had asked who did it and bought a bag of pink sugar just to stand under it. So you kept on with the brushes, loose and wet, letting the colour run where it wanted.

On the last night the generator coughed out at ten past eleven and the lights along the midway went dark one bulb at a time. You stood at the edge of the field with a torch in your teeth and watched a flock lift off the far hedge, black specks rising against a sky going the colour of a bruise. Cal came up beside you, smelling of diesel, and said nothing. Then he pointed at the top of the wheel, where you had painted one long feather on the highest gondola that morning, and the last of the light caught its blue before it faded into the dark.