Realistic colour tattoo of a peacock head and trailing feather on an upper arm, shaded in teal, blue and green.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock and feather on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A peacock's head and neck are shown in close detail, with a trailing feather with an eye pattern running up the arm beside it. The plumage and head use smooth blended shading in teal, blue and green, with fine dark linework around the eye and beak. The arm fills most of the frame against a blurred background with a second peacock-like design.

Realism Upper arm Peacock Peacock feather Feather Eye Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old keeper of the terrace gardens counted the eyes every dawn, the way other men counted coins. There were a hundred and one on the long tail of the bird he called Ankor: green ones near the crown, bronze ones down the middle, and at the tip a deep blue ring with a black heart, which had gone dull the winter his wife died. He counted them aloud so the bird would know it was still wanted.

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One evening a carter's boy named Tobiah came up from the harbour with a debt in his pocket and a sack of barley for his mother. He found the bird asleep on the wall, its neck folded like a sickle blade, and took the longest feather from its tail. He did not look at the eye on it. He sold it that same night to a dyer in the lower town for three coins stamped with a fish, and the dyer hung it over his door where the light could reach it.

By morning the dyer's wife was weeping, though nothing had happened to her. She said that when she looked into the feather she could see the harbour wall at Carrow and her brother's boat coming in against the tide. The keeper heard of it and climbed down the hill with the bird following him, calling in the high cracked voice of an old gate. At the dyer's door the bird stopped, lifted its crest, and shook loose a single feather that fell onto the cobbles, its eye open and bright.

Tobiah came back with the three coins and an apology in his mouth. The keeper took the coins and gave him nothing but a bucket of water for the bird's bath. That week a new feather grew in the tail, and when the keeper counted at dawn he found its eye was not green or bronze but the exact blue of the sea the dyer's wife had seen, with a boy's dark pupil at its centre.