Black ink ornamental tattoo of a peacock with paisley scrollwork across the shoulder and upper arm.

Paisley peacock design on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, showing a stylised bird with a scaled, patterned neck and tail set among paisley-like leaves and scrollwork. The linework is bold and even, with solid black fills and fine dotted details, and the design wraps around the curve of the shoulder. The image is in black and grey with no colour ink, shot close up against a green top and a softly blurred background.

Shoulder Upper arm Peacock Bird Paisley Scrollwork Leaves Scale Ornament Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mam kept the shawl folded in brown paper at the bottom of the dresser drawer, and it came out only for funerals and the Miners' Gala. I was nine before she let me touch it. It was heavy for its size, the wool soft as the inside of a rabbit's ear, and it was printed all over with those curling shapes the pedlar called pine cones, though Dad said they were teardrops with ideas. In the middle sat a bird with its neck bent back like a question, and its tail fanned out in scales that caught the lamplight.

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The pedlar came up Hallgarth Row every second Friday with his case strapped on his back, and the year the Ninety-Fathom seam flooded he took two shillings off Mam and a promise to pay the rest. She never did pay the rest. He was a Scotsman from Paisley with a voice like a kettle, and he told us the peacock was the bird that could not sing but could dance the whole street into the ground. Dad laughed at that until he coughed.

The shawl went down the pit with him once, folded inside his snap tin, because he said a man ought to carry something that was not black. It came home stiff with damp and smelling of sulphur, and Mam washed it three times in the copper before the bird looked like a bird again.

When Dad died they buried him in his pit suit, and Mam laid the shawl over the coffin lid for the walk to St Mary's. Afterwards, on the chapel step, she pressed it into my arms. "Something that isn't black," she said, and I have carried it ever since.