Black ink drawing of a stylised peacock with a raised crest and long tail feathers, drawn on lined notebook paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ink peacock design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised peacock in solid black ink, with a curled crest on its head, a slender neck and a tail of long, tapering feathers ending in teardrop-shaped eye marks. The bird is drawn in bold, smooth strokes with solid black fills and no shading. It is shown alone on a plain white background with faint horizontal ruled lines.

Peacock Bird Feather Crest Tail

Find an artist for this

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 keeper on Scarrow Head had no wife to tell him he was foolish, so he bought the peacock off a Lisbon trader for two sovereigns and a barrel of salt herring. The bird came ashore in a crate that smelled of tar and sea wrack, and it stood on the lamp-room rail with its crest up like a man listening for his name.

Keep reading

It did not sing. Peacocks, the trader had said, cry out before rain and before death, and this one cried out neither, only walked the gallery with its long tail dragging through the gull droppings. But on the nights the fog came up from the bay, it paced in slow circles and spread its feathers, and every eye on every feather opened to catch the beam. The keeper swore the ships saw his light twice as far that way, a single flash broken into a hundred small glass pupils.

The fishing boats of Hallan Cove began to steer by it. Old Mother Crane, who sold winkles from a barrow and claimed to be a mermaid's cousin, said the bird was counting the drowned and turning them back toward home. The keeper laughed at her until the winter the Mary Lowe struck the Teeth with nine men aboard. The peacock stood on the rail all night screaming like a gate in a gale, and at dawn the fog lifted and the men were rowing in, every one of them.

He never sold it. When the bird died in its twelfth winter, he buried it beneath the lamp-house wall and set one black feather on the stone. In spring that feather had grown a tail of its own, long and tapering, with an eye at each tip, and the boats still steer by that wall.