Colour tattoo of an abstract feathered flourish with red, orange, yellow and blue washes and grey shading, on the side of the hip above jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour flourish on the hip

Other · Mixed · Photo

A loose, abstract flourish of feather-like shapes sits across the side of the hip, shaded with soft blended washes. Red, orange, yellow, pink, green and blue ink dominate the left and centre, while the right side is filled in greys and black with fine tapering strokes. The photo is taken close up and slightly angled, with the top of the design cropped at the edge of the frame.

Other Feather Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had the ladder against the old Bramley when the bird came down the row, trailing fire from one wing and nothing at all from the other. She did not look up. You do not look up at a bird that is hunting windfalls in late August, because it will think you are asking something of it.

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It went from tree to tree, pecking the split plums, and where its beak touched fruit the feathers bloomed red and then gold, then a green like the underside of a leaf. Her grandfather had said the orchard was older than the village and older than any bird, and that the bird came every year to remember which apples were sweet. Ada had never believed him. She believed him now, because the bird stopped at the bonfire heap at the end of the row, where the prunings had been smouldering since morning, and stepped into the smoke.

When it came out the other side the right half of it was grey, soft as wood ash, and the grey ran up its neck and out along the tail in tapering strokes like the last of a candle. It looked at her with one eye the colour of cider. "Half and half," it said, in a voice like someone turning pages. "You may take the other half home if you like. Everyone else leaves it on the ground."

Ada climbed down, picked up the last windfall under the Bramley and bit into it. It was sour, and then it was sweet. The bird opened its grey wing and let the ash fall off it in a slow loop, and a single blue feather drifted onto the grass beside her. She kept it in her apron pocket until the first frost, when she carried it out and pressed it into the bark of the old tree, where it stayed.