Colour tattoo of a blue peacock with a long curling green tail and orange flowers on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock and orange flowers on a back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A blue peacock with a crest of small red and orange dots faces left, its long green tail sweeping down and curling into spiral ends with red and orange eye markings. Orange bell-shaped flowers and green leaves arc above the bird in a loose curve. The shading is smooth and the tail feathers are drawn with fine, evenly spaced lines, all set against pale skin.

Traditional Back Peacock Flower Leaves Tail feather Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds were the first thing the steward gave me to mind, before I knew the herbs or could tell a good fig from a split one. Twelve peacocks walked the terrace of the villa at Ostia, and the old man said they belonged to Juno, who did not forgive carelessness. Every dusk I lifted my lamp to the pergola and counted them roosting among the vines.

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The one I loved was the blue cock who stood apart. He would not come to the millet bowl until the orange bell-flowers had opened along the trellis, the ones the gardeners sold to visitors for their courtyards. When they bloomed he came down the steps trailing his tail like a river of wet green silk, and he curled it into tight spirals on the warm flags, each feather ending in an eye, red at the rim and gold at the heart.

In the autumn a merchant from Puteoli offered the steward a purse of silver for him. The steward agreed before the bird had even been asked. I took the cock out past the last wall in the grey before dawn and opened the gate onto the poppy fields. He stood a long moment, looking back at the villa as though he were counting us, then walked into the red and was gone.

The merchant came for his bird and left with a bag of millet and a face like thunder. Nobody asked me where the cock had gone. But each spring the bell-flowers still open along the trellis, and when I cut them for the altar I find a single green feather caught in my sleeve, warm from the sun, its small gold eye looking up at me.