Colour tattoo of a blue and purple peacock among pink blossom branches on the thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Peacock and blossom on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large peacock stands in profile with its head turned down, surrounded by pink five-petalled blossoms on dark branches. The bold black outlines are filled with blue, purple and teal shading, and the tail feathers end in pink and yellow eyes. A soft blue-grey wash sits behind the design, and the tattoo fills the length of the upper thigh.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Peacock Feather Cherry blossom Blossom Branch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first tray was still ticking as it cooled when Ruth came through the back door with the biscuit tin under her arm, the one with the peacock on the lid. She set it on the flour bin without opening it and said nothing, which at four in the morning meant she had been crying in the van.

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I knew the tin. Her mother had kept Sunday shortbread in it at the shop on Marsh Lane until the shop shut in the spring. The peacock was painted freehand, its tail spread in blue and violet and teal, every eye picked out in yellow, and Ruth always said the bird looked as if it was reading the recipe over your shoulder. Pink blossom ran up the side on bent black branches, chipped in two places.

"Mum's paste," she said at last, and lifted the lid. Inside was not shortbread but a folded sheet of greaseproof with the cherry blossom sugar she had been trying to match for a month. "It's wrong," she said. "Every time, it's wrong."

I told her to knead it again while the oven warmed. We worked without talking until the window over the sink went from black to a grey like wet slate, then to the faint green-blue of the tin. Ruth pressed the last blossom onto a bun, five petals, and stood back. The pink had finally come out right, her mother's pink. She set the tin on the shelf facing the door, the peacock looking down at the dough, and went to unlock the front.