Colour tattoo of three blue and teal feathers with pink tips and small beads on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour feathers on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three feathers fanning upwards, with a smaller dangling feather and two pink beads hanging below them. The feathers have soft outlines and blended blue, turquoise and green shading, with pink and red washes at the tips. Splashes of pale colour sit around the design against plain pale skin, which is photographed on a grey surface.

Forearm Feather Bead Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Pellow kept the walled garden behind Coldharbour Mill, and one April morning she found a kingfisher in the rhubarb with one wing folded wrong against its side. It was the colour of the mill-race on a bright day, blue along the back and a green that turned to turquoise where the light caught it. She set it in a shoebox lined with flannel and fed it mealworms from a jar, and she talked to it the way she talked to the bees, because a thing you are mending needs company.

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She bound the wing with linen and a sliver of cane, and by the second week it was eating from her palm. Each morning after that, a feather lay on the potting bench: a long one, then another, then a short one with a rust-pink tip, as if the bird had dipped it in the rose beds. Maud kept them in a teacup. When she had nine she threaded them onto a length of wire with the two pink glass beads that had been her mother's, and hung them from the arbour to dry.

Her nephew Ray came up from the city in May with a man carrying a measuring wheel. The mill had been sold, he said, and the garden lay in the way of the new road. Ray saw the feathers swinging in the arbour and laughed at the wire and the beads, and told her to put the lot in a bin. Maud said nothing. She went back to the bench and watched the measuring man walk slowly along the rhubarb bed.

The kingfisher came down the mill-race like a dropped coin, flashed once over the arbour, and struck straight at the surveyor. It knocked the cap from his head, clattered the tape out of his hand, and was gone over the wall before anyone could shout. The road went round the garden after all. Ray never asked for the feathers again, and on the wire in the arbour the nine of them kept turning in the wind, blue going to green, the pink tips catching the light.