Black and grey drawing of a peacock feather with a heart-shaped eye on a cream background, in a realistic botanical style suited to a tattoo design.

Peacock feather with heart eye

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single peacock feather is drawn diagonally across the frame, with its curling barbs fanning out from a central shaft. The feather's eye sits at the right-hand end and contains a solid black heart inside a white ring. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and pencil-like in black and grey, set against a plain cream background.

Botanical Realism Peacock feather Feather Heart Eye Peacock

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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

Now sit down and mind the cool bottle, because this is a road story and roads don't like to be hurried. Forty miles past Tuzgar, where the tarmac gives up and turns to washboard, there was a petrol stop run by a widow called Mehrnaz Dayan. She kept three goats, a radio that only found one station, and a peacock named Sultan who screamed at the moon like a jilted bride.

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One evening in the hot month, a lorry driver called Idris pulled in with a cracked windscreen and no money to fix it. He had driven that road for nineteen years and never once met a creature that looked back at him. Sultan did. He walked straight up to the cab, lowered his head and stared through the open window, and Idris swore the great eye held a little black heart inside its white ring, the same heart his mother had painted on the lid of her sewing box before she died.

Mehrnaz laughed until she coughed. "He picks the ones carrying something heavy and calling it cargo," she said. She plucked the longest feather from his tail and told Idris to wedge it behind the mirror. Every mile, she said, the eye would open a little wider and show him the road ahead, and when the heart went dark he should stop and sleep.

Idris did not believe a word of it. But the feather rode behind the mirror through three sandstorms and a checkpoint, and each time he glanced up the eye caught the light, and each time he kept driving. Years later he came back on a grey morning with a new windscreen and nothing in the back of the lorry. The goats were gone and Sultan lay dead beneath the fig tree. Mehrnaz had left one feather on the step, the heart as bright as ever, and he took it home.