Colour tattoo of peacock feathers above a cat face with whiskers and a green eye, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Peacock feathers and cat on a shoulder blade

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three peacock feather eyes with orange and green quills, rising above a cat's face with a glowing green-yellow eye and fine white whiskers. Swirling ornamental lines in purple and pink sit beneath the feathers and curl around the cat's muzzle. Colour fills the feathers and swirls, while soft grey shading gives the cat's face its form against the light skin of the upper back.

Neo-trad Back Peacock feather Cat Whiskers Eye Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Demetrios had three days to finish the peacock panel for the grain merchant's atrium, and the cat would not leave the scaffold. It was grey, with a torn ear, belonged to nobody on the street below the Sebennytos gate, and it sat on the planks above his mortar tray watching his brush as though it had been hired to inspect him.

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The merchant's wife had ordered feathers: three eyes of peacock plumage, orange quills at the base where the ochre ran out, green deepening to blue toward the tips. She wanted the cat left out. "Cats belong in the kitchen," she said, and Demetrios nodded and painted the cat anyway, a little each night, setting the whiskers in fine white tesserae by lamplight with a bone pin, and cutting the purple swirls that curled around its muzzle like smoke that had decided to stay.

On the last morning he set the eye of the largest feather, a chip of green-gold glass, and found he had been looking at the cat's eye all along, not the feather's. When the merchant's wife climbed the ladder she stopped halfway, frowned at the panel, and said nothing for a long time.

She paid him in full. By noon the cat had gone from the scaffold, and that evening the atrium floor showed a peacock whose eyes followed anyone who crossed the threshold. Demetrios swept the loose chips into his tray and found, pressed into the wet mortar at the edge, a small clean paw print, perfectly formed, as if the thing had walked across the work once before leaving.