Dark ornamental tattoo of a peacock, paisley motifs and flowers across the top of a foot and up onto the ankle, in a botanical and paisley style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock and paisley tattoo across a foot

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A dark ornamental design covers the top of a foot and the ankle, with a peacock at the ankle and flowers, leaves and curling vines spreading along the top of the foot. The linework is fine and detailed, with solid fills in the paisley and petal shapes and some shading. The ink is a single dark tone with no other colours, and the design is photographed from the side against a light tiled floor.

Botanical Ankle Peacock Paisley Flower Vine Leaf Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shawl came up from the trunk on a Tuesday, folded in tissue gone the colour of weak tea. Mr Ambrose Hale had left it in room four with three weeks' rent owing and a complaint about the damp. My mother wanted it sold to the rag man. I wanted to look at it properly, so I spent the first wet week of September at the kitchen table with the lamp pulled close, tracing the pattern onto greaseproof paper.

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Each teardrop curled over on itself like a sleeping bird's head, and in the largest one, where the design narrowed, a peacock turned its neck back toward the fringe. Its tail opened into a fan of eyes, each ringed in a finer thread than the last. I counted forty-one before the lamp smoked. The woman in the Lewes shop had told me it was woven in Srinagar and took a man most of a year, and that the eyes were there to turn aside the evil glance. My mother called that nonsense and kept the shawl folded over the hall chair all the same.

By October I had copied it onto the breakfast cloths, a little at a time, using the gold thread from my dead aunt's sewing box. The commercial gentleman in room two noticed first. He lifted a napkin, turned it to the window, and asked whether the Pells now employed a girl from London to do the linen. I said we did not, and he left a sixpence under his plate, which my mother pocketed without a word.

On the last night of the month the tide came up so high it slapped the bottom step of the front door. I sat with the shawl across my knees and stitched the final eye into the hem, the one Mr Hale had left unfinished, and when I bit the thread the house went quiet around me, every lodger asleep, the peacock's neck still turned toward the door as if it had heard someone coming up the path.