Flat design sheet showing gold and white peacock feathers with blue eye details beside a blue and gold leopard spot pattern on a grey background.

Gold and blue peacock feathers with leopard spots

Colour · Flash

The image shows three peacock feather motifs in gold and white, each with a solid blue eye, set against a light grey background. A column of blue and gold leopard spots runs down the left edge, and a partial feather is cropped at the right. The linework is clean and flat, with no visible shading, and the colour is limited to blue, gold, white and grey.

Peacock feather Feather Eye Leopard print Spots Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the cut above Stoke Lock, a widow named Hetty Vane kept the narrowboat Patience, and she painted her roses on every panel the way her mother had. One spring a travelling man tied up behind her with a cargo of spotted cloth from the coast, blue and cream, and he sold her a bolt of it for cushions. It was cut like a leopard's coat, all rings and blots, and the bargewomen said it would bring bad luck on the water, for a cat's coat should stay on the cat.

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Hetty did not believe in luck, only in the price of coal. She sewed the cloth into the cabin curtains anyway. That summer the peacock came down the towpath. It was a real bird, its tail dragging through the nettles like a train of lamplight, and every feather had an eye in it, a blue stone set in a gold ring. The bird followed the boat for three miles and would not be shooed. At each lock it stood on the beam and looked into the water, and at each lock Hetty found a feather laid on the coping stone.

She gathered them into a jar. By August it held thirty-one, and the cabin was full of their shine. The spotted curtains went grey with coal smoke, but the feathers stayed gold. When the frost came the travelling man returned, asking for his cloth back. She told him the peacock had it now. He laughed until he saw the feathers, then went quiet and walked off up the towpath without another word.

Hetty kept the boat until she was old. The feathers she set in the window, and anyone who asked was told to look at the eye and not the tail. Nobody on the cut saw the peacock again, though the lock-keeper's boy swore he heard one calling from the reeds the night she died. In the morning the last feather lay on the window ledge, and the lamp caught its blue eye as if it had only been waiting for someone to look.