Wolf Beach Towel Feathers

Drawn barb by barb

Feather vanes are drawn open across this towel, each one split into separate barbs, so they hold their shape as feathers from right across the sand. They fall in black, gold and coral over a deep brick red ground, scattered around a wolf painted from life that sits with its head turned back to face you, with gold scrollwork curling in at the rim of the circle.

A real feather is held together by hooks. Every barb carries hundreds of smaller barbules, and those barbules end in tiny hooklets that catch the ridged barbules of the neighbour, so the vane zips shut into a single sheet. A bird running a feather through its beak is doing up that fastening again.

Colour without dye

Much of the colour in feathers is not pigment at all. Blue is the clearest case. A microscopic lattice of keratin and air inside the barb scatters short wavelengths back at the eye, and if that structure is crushed the blue goes and plain brown is left behind, because the colour lived in the architecture rather than in any dye. Flat ink has to imitate all of it, which is why the drawing carries so much of this design.

Wolves and feathered things keep company in the older stories, both read as scouts and pathfinders, a thread followed in the wolf as a totem animal.

The practical facts

Microfibre, round, in a choice of 100 cm or 150 cm across, 420 g, printed with high quality digital 3D printing and finished with a white tasselled edge. Fast drying and machine washable at 30 degrees. More patterns sit in the wolf beach towel collection.

Free worldwide shipping, 7 to 12 business days. 30 day returns. See our shipping policy for details.