Black line drawing of an ornate peacock with intricately patterned feathers and flowing ribbons, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate peacock with flowing ribbons

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A peacock stands in profile with its head raised and a crest of plumes on top, its tail feathers fanning out behind it. The body and feathers are filled with dense fine-line patterns, scallops, concentric shapes and stippled dots, and long ribbon-like lines curl around the figure. The drawing is entirely in black ink on a white background, with the composition tall and centred.

Fine line Dotwork Peacock Feather Ribbon Swirl Bird Crest Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock had come to the orchard every morning for eleven summers, and every morning Mrs Hollis put out a saucer of bread crusts for the sparrows and pretended not to watch him arrange himself. He knew she watched. That was the point of the ribbons. He had been given them one at a time by the wind, which had been carrying the village's washing lines across the lane since the spring the bell tower came down, and he had kept each one, looping them through his tail until the whole fan of him was bound with silver and dusk-coloured thread.

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The Hollis boy, who was nine and rude, asked him once why he didn't just fly over the wall like the jays did. The peacock told him that a bird who could fly anywhere had to choose where to be looked at, and that choosing was the most difficult work a creature could undertake. The boy went off to fetch his cricket bat. The peacock did not mind. He had decided long ago that the difficult work was the only work worth doing in full view.

On the last morning of August a stranger came up the lane with a case of brushes and a stack of drawing paper, and sat under the medlar tree for three hours. The peacock stood very still. When the stranger finally packed up and walked away, the peacock stepped down from the wall, shook out the ribbons one by one, and found, folded neatly beneath the bread saucer, a sheet of paper on which every feather had been counted, and every curl of thread drawn back exactly where it belonged.