Black and white ink drawing of a peacock with a long curved neck and a tail filled with dense paisley, dot and swirl patterns, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate peacock line drawing in black ink

Black and grey · Flash

A peacock stands in profile with its neck curved upwards and its head turned to the right, with a crest of small dots at the top. The body and fanned tail are filled with intricate doodle-like patterns of paisley shapes, dots, swirls, leaves and eye motifs, drawn in fine black linework and stippling. The drawing is entirely in black ink on a plain white background, with the bird centred and the tail spreading out at the bottom.

Peacock Feather Paisley Dot Swirl Leaves Eye Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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You will think me mad, but I have finished the peacock for Mr Halloran's shawl at last, and it took the better part of ninety days. Every paisley is drawn by hand with a fine nib, and the stippling along the neck alone ate a week. He wanted the bird to look as if it had been drawn in one breath. I told him nothing good is drawn in one breath. It is drawn in ninety days of small ones.

The crest was the hardest. Seven dots on seven thin stalks, each one leaning the same way as the wind I imagine over the mill yard. Mr Halloran came down on Thursday with his spectacles halfway down his nose and said the eyes in the tail were too many. I counted them for him. Forty-one. He said that was forty too many for a respectable shawl, and I said a peacock with fewer eyes would be a poor thing to be looked at by.

I am sorry, I have gone on. What I want to tell you is this. In the lower left, under the leaves where the ink is heaviest, I drew a small eye that nobody asked for, and I gave it three short lashes so it seems to blink at whoever holds the shawl up to the window. It is the only part of the whole piece that is mine alone. The rest belongs to a pattern book from Lahore that my grandfather copied from, and to Mr Halloran's money.

When the shawl goes to the shop on Monday, the forty-first eye will go with it, folded inside. I doubt anyone will ever find it. That is rather the point, I think.

Your loving brother, Tom