Back of a person with arms raised, showing a colour and black peacock feather tattoo with eye motifs and floral sprigs across the upper back and side.

Peacock feather back piece

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back with arms raised shows a large tattoo of peacock feathers with eye motifs, curling stems and clusters of small roses and leaves. The linework is dark and detailed, with shaded feather barbs and pink and brown tones filling the eyes and feather bodies. The design sweeps diagonally from the upper back down the side of the ribs, with the black and grey florals balancing the warmer colour of the feathers.

Botanical Back Ribs Peacock feather Peacock eye Feather Rose Flower Leaves Swirl Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Abernethy had kept the lost property office at Haverbrook station for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had ever come back for the peacock feather. It arrived in a library book left on the 7:14 to Leeds, pressed between pages about the Pennines. She logged it under miscellaneous, tied a green tag to its quill, and dropped it in the biscuit tin with the umbrellas.

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It was a fortnight before she noticed the eye. The dark centre was ringed in bronze, and when the low sun slanted through the grimy window it shifted from wet penny to copper to the deep green of a pond in August. Ruth began opening the tin at odd moments, the way a woman checks on a kettle, though she could not have said what she expected to find. The feather never moved, yet something in the office seemed to lean towards it, the way passengers lean towards a train before it has pulled in.

In April a man in a grey overcoat came to the hatch asking after a lost parcel, and when she shook her head he looked past her at the tin. "You've got one of mine," he said, quite calmly. He described a feather from a bird he had seen once in a zoo in Calcutta, the eye bright enough to wake him at night. Ruth asked for his ticket. He handed over a platform stub dated 1962, for a train that had never left.

On the last Friday of the month she carried the tin out to platform four. The wind off the moor was sharp and the rails hummed. She untied the green tag, held the feather up, and let go. It lifted over the fence and turned its single eye towards the hills, then the 7:14 came round the bend, and the feather was gone behind the carriages. Ruth went back inside to log the empty tin.