Colour tattoo of a green and teal peacock feather with a yellow and pink eye, running from the ankle across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather on the top of a foot

Realism · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A peacock feather runs diagonally from the ankle across the top of the foot towards the toes. The fronds are drawn with fine, curling linework and soft green and teal shading, and the eye at the base is rendered in green, yellow and pink. The feather is set against bare skin on a wooden surface, with the toes in the lower right of the frame.

Realism Ankle Peacock feather Feather Peacock eye Foot Toe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late August, and the windfalls have started to split in the long grass under the Bramleys. You go out before the wasps wake, carrying the bucket and the cracked tea tin, because Mrs Okafor's peacock has been moulting again and the feathers come down over the wall like dropped letters. Nobody else in the village bothers to pick them up. Nobody else would think to.

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The bird belongs to the old vicarage, though the vicar has been gone eleven years and the peacock has outlived two dogs and a gardener. It screams at dusk like a rusted gate. You have learned to walk the rows with your head down, counting the green-gold eyes in the dew, each one shivering a little when the light finds it. Yesterday there were nine. This morning there are four, and one of them is so fresh its barbs still hold the colour of the sky before rain.

You wrap it in a dock leaf and carry it to the cider shed, where Mrs Okafor sits on an upturned crate with her hands around a mug. She does not look up. She holds out her palm, and you lay the feather across it, eye upward. "Teal first," she says, the way she has said it every August, "then the green. Pink is a liar. Don't trust pink."

That night you pin the feather above the workbench, and the lamp catches the eye and makes it wink. You do not tell her the bird has been watching you from the wall all afternoon. Some things in an orchard are only for watching.