Colour Japanese style tattoo of a peacock with red and orange peonies across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Peacock and peony tattoo on shoulder and arm

Japanese · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a peacock with its head turned over the shoulder, surrounded by red and orange peony blooms and dark green leaves. An orange rope-like cord wraps around the bird's body, and the tail feathers hang down the upper arm with orange and brown eye markings. The bold outlines and shading are set against a plain blue background, with the skin tone softly lit.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Peacock Peony Rope Leaves Feather Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands on the rope, not the bird, my grandmother used to say, because a peacock that thinks it is being admired will never sit still for a knot. That was the lesson the ropemaker's son learned the summer the peonies came out early along the Sato wall, and the peacock came down from the hill to see them.

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It was the vainest creature in the valley. It had eyes painted on its tail, orange and brown like the lamps on a fishing boat, and every morning it counted them in the water trough. Haru, the ropemaker, had twisted a cord from the old net hemp and dyed it with persimmon until it glowed, and he meant to bind the bird's breast so it could be sold at the autumn fair. The bird came closer for the flowers, red as cooked crab, and let him loop the cord once around its body.

But the bird was cleverer than the rope. Each time Haru pulled, it turned its head over its shoulder to look at the blooms, and each time it turned, the coils slackened. By dusk he had tied nothing but his own fingers into knots. He sat down among the peonies and laughed until his ribs hurt, and the bird, pleased with him, stepped onto the path and left the cord behind as a fee.

Years later, when the peonies had gone to seed along the wall, Haru's granddaughter found the cord coiled on the step, still warm from the sun, with one tail feather tucked beneath it like a bookmark. She never tied anything with it. She hung it on a nail by the door, where the light from the garden could reach it, and it is still there.