Colour realism tattoo of a peacock feather with a blue and green eye spot, running from the upper arm up over the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather on shoulder and upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A long peacock feather curves up over the shoulder, with its eye spot sitting on the upper arm in teal, blue and gold. The fine barbs are drawn with soft, fading strokes, and the feather's shading gives it a three-dimensional, lifelike look. The tattoo is shown against plain skin, with a dark top and a white bra strap visible at the edge of the frame.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Peacock feather Feather Peacock eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock gates at Stanwell Bottom had been sticking since Tuesday, and Ada Pryce spent the first hour of the morning with her shoulder against the balance beam, swearing at the water as though it had personally wronged her. Behind her the barge Mercy sat low under two tons of sand, her tiller still warm from the lad who had steered her out of Reading.

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The feather had come with the boat. Tucked behind the stove flue in the wheelhouse, wrapped in a page torn from an old seed catalogue, it was the only thing her uncle Tobias had left her that wasn't a debt. Ada had meant to drop it over the side at Oxford. Instead she pinned it above the chart table, where the morning light through the port window lit the eye on it the colour of a kingfisher's back and turned the gold ring nearly to brass.

When the top gate finally groaned open, a man came down the towpath with a windlass over his shoulder and a grey dog at his heels. Samuel Ketch, the lock keeper, took one look at the feather through the wheelhouse door and laughed. His peacock had gone missing the spring before, he said, a bad-tempered thing called Admiral that screamed at every barge that passed. Ada offered it back. He shook his head. "Keep it. He always did like a boat better than a garden."

She brought the Mercy into the chamber with the water boiling white around her hull. As the gates closed and the level began to climb, the eye above the chart table caught the lamp and seemed, for one dark stretch of stone, to be watching the water rise with her.