Black line drawing of an ornate peacock with a swirling head plume and long decorative tail feathers, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate peacock line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A bird, resembling a peacock, is drawn in black outline with its head turned upward and a curled plume above. Its long tail feathers trail down the image in a sinuous curve, each filled with fine decorative swirls, scrolls and inner feather patterns. The drawing is in black ink on white with no shading, colour or body placement shown.

Peacock Bird Feather Swirl Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife at Carrick Nab kept a peacock because the fishermen across the bay said a bird with eyes in its tail could see weather coming. Her name was Morwenna Pell, and every evening she scattered barley from her apron at the foot of the tower steps, and the bird took it from her hand as if it had been raised among people.

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The tail grew longer each year until it swept the stones behind her. One November the lamp failed. The oil in the reservoir had frozen, the wick would not take, and three boats were out past the Hanging Rocks with nothing to steer by. Morwenna climbed the one hundred and twelve steps with a candle in her teeth, and the peacock came up behind her, its feathers dragging and whispering on every stair.

At the top she could not light the lamp, so the bird lifted its tail across the great glass. Each swirl and scroll on those feathers took the candle's small heat and threw it outward, and every eye along the plumes opened and blazed. The boats saw a hundred gold lights standing on the headland and turned for them, and all three came home before dawn.

In the morning the bird was gone. Her husband swore the gallery rail was bare, but every spring since, a new curl of tarnished brass has appeared on it, shaped exactly like the feather that rested there, and the keepers at Carrick Nab still leave barley on the rail for whatever might come back in the dark.