Large colour tattoo of a teal peacock with red peonies and small flowers across a woman's upper and lower back, in a neo-traditional style.

Peacock and peonies across the back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A teal peacock with a raised crest and spread tail feathers is set among red and pink peonies and small red flowers. Bold dark outlines define the bird and feathers, with layered green, blue and teal shading in the tail and wing, and the tail eye spots are rendered in purple and red. The design runs down the back, with a smaller flower motif and a line of Korean script at the nape of the neck.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Peacock Peony Flower Feather Bird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the peacock before the pickers do, standing in the Discovery rows at six in the morning with dew on its crest and a windfall held in its beak like a stolen sweet. It is Mrs Aske's bird, the one that screams like a gate when it wants feeding, and it has been living off the orchard since the frost went out of the ground.

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By seven you have it in the lane. Mrs Aske is at her gate with a kettle in one hand, looking along the wall at her peonies, which went over a fortnight ago and now hang their heavy heads on the wire. She says the bird went over at dusk and she doesn't mind if it stays, so long as no one lets the foxes near it. You offer to take it home. She says you can try.

It will not walk. It stops at every gatepost and fans its tail out in the hedge bottom, and each time the feathers open you count the eyes along the train, purple rings with red at the heart, seventeen of them, then lose the count when the wind lifts a row. Halfway back you stop counting and simply stand, because the sun has come through the apple leaves and every eye has caught it at once, and for a moment the whole lane is watching you.

When it finally folds its tail and walks through Mrs Aske's gate, one long feather is left drifting in the grass. You pick it up, turn it to the light, and find the eye still looking back at you, patient as a fruit that has decided not to fall. You tuck it into your cap and walk the rows to the start of the day's picking, and the windfalls go soft in the grass behind you.