Realistic peacock feather tattoo in teal, orange and pink with grey shaded fronds, placed on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feather tattoo on the lower leg

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A peacock feather is shown with its eye in teal, blue, orange, yellow and pink, shaded to suggest depth. The stem and wispy lower fronds are rendered in soft black and grey shading, with the feather sweeping diagonally up the leg. The colour is concentrated in the eye while the lower section fades into greyscale, and the plain skin background keeps the focus on the design.

Realism Calf Peacock feather Feather Eye Stem

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Lysandra, the ship from Berenice came in on the north wind last week, and with it a crate of cassia bark, two bolts of Indian cotton and a peacock that screamed at the dockhands for three days straight. Kallias the trader says it was a gift from a prince, though I suspect he won it at dice. The bird now sulks in the courtyard behind the oil press, and our cook has cursed it in four languages.

Keep reading

Before the crate was loaded, the bird shed a single feather, and Kallias pressed it on me as payment for mending his lamp. You have never seen anything like it. The stem is as long as my forearm and dark as wet wood, and at its tip the eye opens in a disc of teal so deep it looks wet, ringed with copper, then gold, then a pink like the inside of a shell. Hold it to the lamp and the blue seems to move. Lower down, the fronds lose their colour altogether, thinning into grey strands like smoke caught on a thorn.

Kallias told me the eye is the part that sees, and the grey is what the feather was before it learned to watch. I laughed, and he asked whether I had been lying to Father about the lamp. I had. I confessed it, and the eye, which I had taken for paint, seemed to catch the light a little brighter. I am still not sure whether that is nonsense or whether I am simply tired.

I have pinned the feather above my loom, where the morning sun comes through the shutter. Tell Mother I am eating properly and that the bird is not, under any circumstances, to be taken to Antioch. Write soon, and tell me what the wind is doing on your side of the sea. Your sister, Thaïs.