Colour tattoo of a peacock feather in green, teal and blue with a black outline, centred on a woman's upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A peacock feather tattoo runs vertically down the centre of the upper back, with its eye at the top and the tapering quill below. The barbs are drawn with fine dark outlines and softly shaded green, teal and yellow-green, with a bright blue ring around the eye. The photograph is taken from behind against a dark background, so the tattoo is the clear focal point.

Back Peacock feather Feather Peacock eye Quill

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had kept the boarding house on Marine Terrace for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had ever seen her sleep. The guests agreed on this over breakfast, between the kippers and the complaints about the damp. What they didn't know was the feather she kept in the drawer of the hall table, pressed flat between two pages of the parish register, its eye turned upward like something listening.

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Ruth, the new girl from Hartlepool, found it while dusting. The blue ring around the eye was bright enough to make her blink, and when she held it to the window the green barbs shifted from teal to brass, as if the light off the sea were working through them. "Put that back," said Mrs Hollis from the stairs. Ruth did, but not before she noticed the eye had moved a little toward the door.

That night the wind came off the water hard and the sash rattled in every room. Ruth lay awake counting the lodgers' footsteps and realised there was one more set than there should be, slow and deliberate, pausing outside each door as if checking the lock. In the morning the drawer stood open and the feather lay on the bare oak, its quill pointed at the front door, and the eye had gone dark as a drowned thing.

Mrs Hollis said nothing. She only poured the tea and asked Ruth to fetch the register. The last page had a new entry in careful copperplate, a name Ruth didn't know, and beside it, in the margin, a small blue ring drawn in ink that was still wet.