Black ink ornamental tattoo of peacock feathers, flowers and a bird across a shoulder, with a botanical feel.

Peacock feather and floral ornament on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows peacock feathers, a bird, a large open flower and leafy sprigs arranged in a fan across the shoulder and upper arm. The linework is fine and even, with the outlines filled in solid black and little shading, giving a flat, ornamental look. The design uses only black ink on pale skin, and the composition curves around the shoulder joint.

Botanical Shoulder Peacock feather Bird Flower Leaf Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock came over the wall of Hallam's orchard the week after the hard frost of '53, and nobody in Shelling Cross could say whose it was. Mrs Tull put a dish of barley on her step for it, and it ate, and it stayed. By March it had spread its tail along the lychgate like a fan somebody had forgotten to fold, and the children stopped running past it and started counting its eyes.

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The vicar said it was a sign of something, though he would not say what. Boys pulled feathers for their caps until Mrs Tull threatened them with the rolling pin. Edwin Tull took one anyway, a long green-gold feather with a blue eye at its tip, and for a month his hat would not stay on his head, his mother's letters went astray, and the blue eye seemed to follow him up the lane. Ivy, his sister, said it was only the wind. She was twelve and believed in nothing that could not be pressed in a book.

The bird wanted something back. Nobody heard it speak, but Ivy woke one morning to find it standing on her windowsill, and in the frost on the glass someone had scratched a flower with a claw. She knew the flower: the small white one that grew only on the stone bridge, opening once each winter when the river froze. She went down before light with her mother's kitchen knife and cut it, put it in a jam jar on the sill, and the peacock took it in its beak and walked back over the wall without looking round.

Ivy never saw it fly. In the morning there were three feathers on the sill, one for each arch the bridge still had, and the lychgate tail had folded shut. The bridge rail was bare, and the river ran black under the ice. Edwin's hat sat straight on his head from that day, and the blue eyes stayed open in the drawer where Ivy kept them, pressed flat between the pages of her school atlas, watching the lane.