Realism style tattoo of a peacock feather with a green and blue eye, shaded in black and grey on a torso.

Peacock feather on the side of the torso

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A peacock feather runs diagonally down the skin, with its eye at the top drawn in green, blue and yellow with a dotted texture and a dark centre. The rest of the feather is shaded in black and grey with fine, feathered strokes and a pale central shaft. The image is a close, evenly lit photograph against a soft, warm-toned background.

Realism Other Peacock feather Feather Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacocks were a gift from a wool merchant who believed they would bring the house luck. The abbot, who believed no such thing, gave them to Brother Anselm to keep. They screamed at vespers like rusted hinges and ate the cabbages, and Anselm loved them without reservation. When the old white hen died in the January frost, he found her moulted feathers scattered through the cloister grass, and among them one long quill, whole and unbroken.

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He carried it to the scriptorium and propped it against his ink pot. Candlelight moved across its eye, so that it blinked green, then blue, then a yellow like new butter as he turned the page. Brother Julian, who copied psalms with a sour mouth, called it vanity and said it belonged in the kitchen fire. Anselm ignored him. That night he ground lapis and verdigris into the gall ink and began painting the margins of the Book of Tobit, one small eye at a time, until the dull vellum seemed to be watching the room.

The abbot found the pages in spring and summoned Anselm to the chapter house, where the whole community stood to hear the charge. Anselm waited, holding the feather as though it could speak for him. "Those colours," the abbot said slowly, "are not ours to use." Anselm answered that the feather had come to him from the cloister, and the cloister belonged to God, and so did every creature that had died inside its walls.

The abbot said nothing for a long while. Then he asked to see the last page Anselm had painted, the one with its dark centre still unfinished. Anselm dipped his brush and shaped the pupil into a small heart. The abbot looked at it, then closed the book with a soft clap, and the peacock eye stayed open on the table between them.