Split image of a colour peacock feather tattoo on a forearm, with the full-colour tattoo above and the faded, ghosted outline below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather on a forearm, before and after fading

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a peacock feather with a green plume, orange and blue eye, and dark blue-black outline runs along the forearm. The lower image shows the same area with the design faded to a pale grey ghost, suggesting a fading or removal treatment. The background is a plain, out-of-focus wall.

Forearm Peacock feather Feather Eye

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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

Ruth Abernethy sorted the lost-property box every Thursday at Carlow Junction, between the single clog, the cricket bat with no handle and the umbrellas that never got their owners back. Most weeks there was nothing worth a second look. Then one March there was a peacock feather sealed in a glassine sleeve, its eye so bright under the strip light that she held it up to the window to see whether it was glass.

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She logged it as found on platform four and pinned the ticket to the board. Over the following weeks she noticed the eye losing its heat. The orange went to the colour of weak tea and the blue sank to slate. She blamed the lamps, then the damp in the cellar. Dennis, who had porter's hands and no patience for superstition, told her that things left too long in the box lost their colour, the way a coat left in the rain fades at the shoulders.

A young man came asking for a blue scarf in April, not a feather, and went away with nothing. Ruth kept the sleeve on the shelf above the kettle anyway, checking it each morning as if it owed her an account.

On the last Thursday in May the eye was gone altogether. Only the spine and the fine barbs remained, grey as pencil rubbed on wet paper. Ruth wrote CLAIMED in careful capitals beside the ticket, put the sleeve in her coat pocket and walked out past the barrier into the evening, lighter than she had been all spring.