Traditional style flash drawing of a green peacock perched above a cluster of red roses and green leaves, outlined in bold black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock and roses flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a green peacock with a crest of pink dots, perched at the top above a cluster of three large red roses and smaller buds. Bold black outlines and dark shading define the feathers, petals and leaves, with yellow highlights in the rose centres. The design is arranged in a tall, centred composition on a pale background.

Traditional Peacock Rose Leaves Feather Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock would not come down from the broken arch until I had counted its crest twice, so I stood in the nettles at the foot of Hollin Keep and counted, one pink knob at a time, while my father swore at the gate hinge behind me. Seven. Then eight, when it lifted its head and the light caught the last one.

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Lady Ashworth had kept the bird when she kept nothing else. The estate went to a man in Leeds who never came north of his own golf course, and the roof went in the winter of the great frost, but the roses she had trained up the south wall kept growing as if nobody had told them. Red ones, three big heads for every bud, climbing the stones and pushing through the windows of rooms with no floors. My father said they were the only thing still holding the wall up. He did not say it kindly.

The farm lads wanted the bird shot for what it did to the hen house, so I climbed the ivy scaffold to the arch to shoo it off. Its feathers were green as bottle glass and wet with mist, and the eyes on its tail opened all at once, a hundred of them looking at me over the drop. I did not reach it. It stepped off the stone onto the rose canes, and they bent under its weight and held, and it walked down them like a woman going downstairs in a long dress.

I came down with thorn scratches across both palms and a single bloom I had pulled loose by accident. I put it in the gatehouse window where Lady Ashworth's post used to be left. The peacock watched from the wall, unhurried, while the stones around the rose settled a little further into the nettles and stayed exactly where they were.