Colour realism tattoo of a peacock feather with a blue and green eye on the inner forearm, shaded with teal, pink and gold.

Peacock feather tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peacock feather fills the forearm, with its eye centred in the lower half and feathery strands sweeping up and across the skin. The shading is smooth and blended, with soft gradients in teal, green, pink and orange that give the feather a three-dimensional look. The dark background frames the arm closely, and no face, text or signature is visible.

Realism Forearm Peacock feather Peacock eye Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard wardens of Vell had kept a single peacock on the terraces since the water came back, and it was the only thing on the hill that ever looked up. Every morning Oda carried the grain bucket past its roost and every morning it turned its head to watch the sky over the eastern ridge, where the dust clouds once rolled in from the salt flats.

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When the old warden Tamsin died in the thaw, she left Oda the bird, the bucket and a tin box of seed-bank keys. Nobody else wanted the job. The bird was hard to handle and the children teased it with stones. Oda sat on the wall with the box on her knees and tried each key on the lock until one turned, and inside was a folded leaf of plastic with a drawing of a feather on it, its eye painted in blue and rust and a green so deep it looked wet.

She walked the bird down to the shallow pool below the cistern and stood it on the stones. It opened its train slowly, like a sail catching wind, and the sun went through the barbs and split into colours across the water. A boy from the lower terraces came to stare. Then his mother came. Then the whole hill came, and nobody spoke, because a feather the length of a man laid across the reeds looked like a door that had been left open on purpose.

That autumn Oda pressed a single eyed feather between two panes of glass and hung it in the seed house window. The bird went on being difficult. But when the eastern ridge darkened, it no longer watched the dust. It watched the feather, and so did Oda, and the terraces filled again with green.