Colour botanical tattoo of peacock feathers, flowers and dark swirls across a lower abdomen above white underwear, with a hand touching the design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather and floral tattoo on the abdomen

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows peacock feathers with green and blue eyes, alongside stylised flowers and dark swirling stems with dotted accents. Black linework defines the stems and petals, while the feathers and leaves are filled with green and blue. A hand touches the design at the right of the frame against a plain light background.

Botanical Other Peacock feather Flower Leaf Swirl Dot Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, the pass was shut three days by snow, so I have had time to count the peacock feathers Old Rhoda sold me at the inn at Caddon Gap. She swore each one had been plucked from a bird that died of old age in a walled garden, not from the hunters who come up in autumn. I paid too much. You will say so, and you will be right, but I have decided to think of it as a fair price for a thing that looks back at you.

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The eyes are what I cannot stop looking at. Rhoda's feathers had a green ring round a blue centre, and when the lamp moved they seemed to follow the room. I pressed three of them into the ledger to keep the pages flat. Mother would have called it wasteful, but the ledger has always been mostly lies about wool prices, so the feathers can hardly make it worse.

The stems were harder. Rhoda said to draw them dark, the colour of the bog water under the pass, and to let the leaves curl where the wind had bent the bushes. I sketched them on the back of an order form with a burnt stick, and because the inn had no ink, I dotted the swirls with the tip of my knife. Every dot is a day I spent waiting for the road to open.

The carter came through this morning with a clear sky behind him. He says the path down to the valley is passable if we go slowly. I am packing the feathers in oiled paper, the sketch folded inside my coat. When I reach you, I will show you the design and you can tell me whether the eyes still look back. Your sister, Ilse.