Colour tattoo of soft purple, teal and pink splashes trailing into a feather on the shoulder, next to a dark top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour splashes and feather on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo sits on the upper shoulder and chest and is made of loose, splattered patches of purple, teal and blue, with a few small pink flecks. A feather-like wisp in pink, purple and teal curves to the right and fades into the skin at its tip. The shading is soft and painterly with no hard black outlines, and the background shows a black top and a white lace fabric.

Shoulder Feather Splashes Watercolour Abstract

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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 paint went wrong on the Tuesday, which is why Mrs Abernethy sent for me instead of the boy from the chandler's. Forty tins of marine enamel had been left in the sun behind the net loft, the lids had lifted in the night, and the whole yard smelled of linseed and salt. The lilac pigment had crusted into a skin on top of the teal.

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I was twelve and had been sweeping shavings for a year. Mr Abernethy painted names on the stern boards of fishing cobles, and his wife kept the books and the paint mixes in a ledger with a green cover. She had never once let me touch it. That morning she stood over the spilled tins with her arms folded and said, 'Well, Nell, you may as well see what colour a mess makes.'

We poured the lot into a tin bath and let it settle. The purple sank, the teal floated, and where they met a pink thread lifted through the water like smoke. I dipped a gull's flight feather in it and drew it slowly across a scrap of board. The colour ran off the quill in streaks, thinning as it went, until the tip was nothing but a breath of wet on the wood. Mrs Abernethy looked at it for a long while, then opened the ledger and wrote my name under the mixes.

Forty years on I still cannot match that morning. Customers bring me photographs and ask for the same blend, and I tell them the sea did most of the work. The ledger sits in a glass case at the harbour office now, open at a page where a single grey feather is pressed flat between the lines.