Colour tattoo of a peacock feather with a blue and red-brown eye and green curling strands, outlined in black, on an upper arm.

Peacock feather on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A peacock feather runs vertically down the skin, with its eye at the top in blue and a reddish-brown ring. The long green strands curl outwards and back, with fine dark outlines defining each one. Green shading gives the barbs some depth, and the bare skin around them keeps the composition open.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion remembered the peacock feather in the glass case outside the science room, which I found hard to forgive, because for six years I had stood in front of it every morning waiting for the bell. Mrs Pryce had pinned it to green baize with a card that said LOOK AT THE EYE, NOT THE FEATHER, and we never did. We just pressed our noses to the glass and argued about whether it was real.

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The hall smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and the parquet still lifted at the corner by the stage. I was halfway through a second glass of something pink when Terry Vance crossed the room in a navy suit that did not quite close over his stomach. He had been the boy who put his elbow through the case in Year Nine, and the feather vanished the same week. Everyone assumed he had sold it on.

He did not look at me. He took a folded square of tissue from his inside pocket and opened it on the trestle table between the crisps and a tray of tiny quiches. Inside lay a single barb, green as bottle glass, its dark outline drawn so finely it looked like a hair of ink. Couldn't throw it out, he said. Couldn't put it back either.

I picked it up by the quill. The blue eye was gone, of course, but when I tilted it toward the strip lights the rust-coloured ring showed faintly at the tip, like a bruise that had almost healed. Mrs Pryce had been right, in her way. The eye was the only part worth looking at, and I had spent six years staring at the wrong thing.

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