Close view of a realistic peacock feather tattoo on the back of a person's neck, with a teal and blue eye and black shading along the shaft.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather on the back of the neck

Realism · Neck · Mixed · Photo

A single peacock feather runs vertically down the back of the neck, with fine black linework and shading along the barbs and shaft. The feather's eye is rendered in blue and teal with green tones around it, while the rest of the feather is mostly dark grey to black. The photograph is taken from behind and above, with the tattoo centred in the frame against lightly freckled skin and hair pulled up at the top.

Realism Fine line Neck Peacock feather Feather Peacock eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock came up the orchard lane the week the Bramleys began to drop, when the wasps had grown fat and slow in the windfalls. Nobody on Hollin Farm claimed him. Dad said he'd come over from the Pritchards' place across the valley, where they kept a dozen and let them shout at the moon. I didn't care whose he was. I cared that he walked between the rows like a man inspecting his property, and that every third step he stopped to lift his train and shake it out over the grass.

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The feathers were the thing. He dropped them without fuss, one at a time, and I started collecting them in a biscuit tin under the cider press. By the first week of September the tin held eleven. I'd hold each one to the light coming through the cart shed door and count the eyes, those dark rings with a blue heart in the middle, and I decided the blue was the only true colour on the farm. Everything else was brown, or green going brown.

Dad found me at it on the Saturday. He didn't say anything about the tin. He took a Bramley off the low branch, polished it on his trouser leg, and handed it to me. "Your gran used to say a peacock's eye is there so the bird can see the rot coming," he said. "Thought she was daft." He sounded like he'd only just decided she hadn't been.

The peacock left the next morning, walking back down the lane toward the valley road as if he'd settled a debt. I kept the tin. The longest feather I laid across the windowsill where the light could find the eye, and for a while the whole room seemed to be watching the orchard for something.