Colour realism tattoo of a peacock feather with a blue and green eye running down the upper arm and shoulder.

Peacock feather on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A peacock feather runs from the shoulder down the outer upper arm, with its eye sitting near the top of the shoulder. The barbs are drawn in dark outline with fine green shading, and the eye has brown, teal and blue tones with soft highlights. The feather curves diagonally down the arm against a plain light background and a person wearing a black sleeveless top.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Peacock feather Feather Eye Peacock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobin had gathered nine feathers from the bracken before the bell in Wrenfold went for vespers, and he was still one short when the bird stepped out from under the hazels. It did not walk like a hen. It walked like a magistrate, each foot set down on the leaf litter as though the ground had been asked its permission first. The tail trailed behind it, a long green fan that hissed through the nettles, and every barb seemed to carry its own small light.

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His gran had told him a peacock's tail was a ledger of the wood, one eye for every tree and every creature that had crossed beneath it, and that anyone lingering past dusk would have their name written in. He had laughed at that. He did not laugh now. The bird stopped and turned its head, and the eye on the nearest feather settled on his boots, blue at the centre and ringed in bronze, patient as a bailiff.

The bird led him down the path to the keeper's cottage, where Margery Pell sat at a scrubbed table beside a lamp, a book bound in green cloth open under her hands. She did not look up. She turned the pages past the names of foxes and rooks and a farmer's runaway goat until she reached a clean sheet and dipped her pen. Tobin waited for the scolding. Instead she asked how many feathers he had found, and when he said nine, she nodded as though that was the correct number for a boy of his age.

She wrote something short and turned the book round for him. There was his name, written small, and beside it a single ink eye, open and watching, with a tiny mark beneath it that meant the ledger had already forgiven him. The peacock settled on the windowsill and folded its tail away, and for the first time that evening the wood was quiet.