Flash drawing of a peacock feather with purple lavender sprigs and black scrollwork in a botanical style, shown on white paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather and lavender design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a peacock feather with its blue, green and red eye at the centre, set against two sprigs of purple lavender. Black scrollwork with curled flourishes runs along the stem and the lower half of the composition. The design is rendered in coloured ink and pencil with fine outlines on a plain white background.

Botanical Peacock feather Lavender Scrollwork Flourish Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock at Carrow Hold screamed each dusk when the lamp-lighters came up the hill, and the old steward swore it was the only creature in the kingdom that could not be made to hold its tongue. Mirelle, the dyer's girl, did not mind the noise. She carried a basket of lavender cuttings up the terrace every evening, set it down beneath the wall where the bird picked at the seed heads, and waited for whatever feathers came loose in the grass.

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The king had promised a purse of silver to anyone who brought him a feather with its whole eye intact, the blue of a river under ice, ringed with green and then red like a banked coal. Men from the lowland towns had come and gone. Each returned with a bundle of broken quills and a face that would not meet anyone's. Mirelle wanted no silver. She wanted one feather so she could match the eye in her vats, a colour no mordant in the valley could fix.

One dusk the bird came down the terrace itself, stepping between the lavender rows with its train dragging like a wet cloak. It did not peck at the basket. It turned its head and looked at her with one eye, then the other, as if counting her. Then it lifted the long feather from its back, the one with the eye at its tip, laid it across her cuttings, and walked back up the hill without a sound.

The king reached for the feather with both hands, saw the eye, and said nothing for so long that the court began to shuffle. Then he asked what she wanted. She said only that the vats needed a colour no dye could make, and that she would keep the lavender growing where the bird could reach it. He laughed and gave her the seed rows. That autumn the purple sprigs climbed the walls of Carrow Hold, and the peacock never screamed again, though nobody could say whether it had gone quiet from content or from simply listening.