Colour tattoo of a peacock feather with purple hearts and a small blue butterfly on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather and hearts on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A peacock feather with a green, blue and yellow eye at its base is the main subject, curving diagonally across the top of the foot. Small purple hearts trail along both sides of the feather, and a tiny blue butterfly sits near its upper tip. The shading is soft with fine outlines, and the bright colour sits against lightly lit pale skin on a white background.

Other Peacock feather Heart Butterfly

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king of Harrowmere kept his peacocks on the eastern terrace, and every autumn they dropped their feathers into the moat, where the carp ate the gold of the eyes and left the green. My father raked that moat for a living. I was nine the summer I found the first feather the water had not spoiled, and I carried it up to the palace kitchens as if it were a letter sealed by the queen herself.

Keep reading

Cook took it from me and turned it in the window light. 'You want to know what the eye is for?' she asked. I did not. I wanted a sweetheart, or a coin, or a way out of the mud. She told me the eye was a window that looked back at whoever looked into it, and that every heart a feather had ever broken it must mend by ferrying one small grief across the water. Then she gave me a currant bun and sent me home.

That winter the flood took my father's boat and the lamp he kept in its bow. I went out to the moat at dusk with the feather, not knowing what I was asking for, until a blue butterfly lifted from the reeds and settled on its tip. Purple hearts came after it, one by one, drifting over the black water, each one a grief I had been carrying and had never learned how to set down.

My father is old now and rows a skiff with a new lamp. The moat still carries feathers, and I still rake it, but I walk with my eyes on the water the way Cook taught me, searching for the ones that have kept their colour. When I find one I hold it up, and it looks back at me, and I give it to whoever is crying on the bank.