Black line drawing of a peacock feather with a curled eye and flowing swirls on a white background, a botanical tattoo design.

Peacock feather line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a peacock feather with a central eye formed by a dark oval and a white inner circle, surrounded by fine radiating strokes. Long, tapering lines flow upwards and outwards into curled tendrils, with the feather quill extending down the centre. The linework varies in thickness and the image uses solid black ink on a plain white background with no shading.

Botanical Peacock feather Peacock eye Feather Swirl Tendril Plume

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock-seller swore the bird was Hera's own, and that every eye on its tail had been taken from Argus, the hundred-eyed watchman, after Hermes sang him to sleep. I told him that was the kind of tale men sold with fish, and he laughed and let me hold a feather anyway. The eye in the middle was the colour of wet olive, a dark oval cut into a pale centre, and the fine strokes around it fanned out like the pleats of a Persian fan. I paid him two obols for it, the last of the money my mother had hidden in the flour jar.

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My father kept the scribe's shop by the agora and had no patience for ornaments. He said a peacock quill would split on papyrus and told me to leave it in the box. I did not. That night, with the lamp guttering and the house asleep, I cut the shaft with his knife and dipped the tip in the soot ink. The barbs drew the ink along their length like rain running down a window, and when I pressed the nib to the wax the first letter came out thick and dark, then thin, then thick again, the way the feather seemed to breathe.

I wrote to my brother Kallias at the garrison on the northern wall. I told him what I had overheard at the gate, that father had borrowed against the shop from a man who smiled too often, and that the man meant to take the scrolls at the new moon. I had not known I was going to write it until the ink ran dry at the bottom of the page.

Kallias replied before the month was out, in a hand so careless I could tell he had written it standing up. He had found a second feather in the garrison stores, he said, and hung it above his cot. He wanted me to watch the gate and tell him who came and went. I fold his letter into the box beside the quill now. Every evening I count the eyes on the feather, though there is only ever one, and it is always open.