Colour tattoo of three peacock feathers with green and red eyes and a small swirl on the lower back, above a dark waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock feathers on lower back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

Three peacock feathers with green and orange-red eyes run diagonally across the lower back, with fine black strands sweeping through the fronds. A small curled tendril with a leaf-like tip sits to the right. The shading is soft, and the colour is set against the skin with black linework and darker feather edges.

Realism Back Peacock feather Peacock eye Feather Swirl Tendril

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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 Abernethy counts the feathers twice before she lets you take the parcel, tapping each one with a bent fingernail as though they might fly off the counter. There are nine, wrapped in brown paper that smells of the Hall's damp cellar, and she tells you not to look at the eyes. You look anyway. The green rings are the colour of the canal water behind the gasworks, and the orange at their centres catches the shop's one bulb.

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Your cousin Ted brought them down from the big house after the gardener's boy was dismissed for keeping a bird in the coal shed. Nobody in Thrale Row wanted a peacock on the roof, so the feathers went to the haberdashery instead, pinned to a card between the bias binding and the hat elastic. Ted says a woman from the county bought the lot for a hat she never wore to the summer dance. The rest of the town said nothing, which in Thrale Row is how you know it was talked about.

You take the parcel up the hill in the rain, keeping it under your coat, and the feathers rustle against your ribs every time you stop to breathe. At the gate of the Hall the lamp is already lit in the scullery. You knock, and a man you have never seen opens the door with a cigarette in his mouth and asks what you have there.

You hold it out. He unwraps one corner, studies the nearest eye for a long moment, and says the bird must have died in the spring, though nobody had reported it. Then he laughs, low, and shuts the door on you, and all the way back down the hill the feathers keep watch from inside the brown paper, green and unblinking.