Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a peacock with spread eye feathers on the upper chest.

Peacock on upper chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A peacock stands in profile with its head turned to the left and its tail fanned out below, the feathers ending in blue, green and orange eye motifs. The bird has bold dark outlines, smooth colour fills and white highlights on the wing and neck. Soft pink shading sits behind the design, and the composition sits across the upper chest near the collarbone.

Neo-trad Chest Peacock Peacock feather Bird Feather Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock came down Colliery Row the week the Hepworth shaft flooded, walking as though the cobbles had been laid for him alone. Nobody in Lower Garth owned him. Tom Oakley's wife said he had been a travelling man's bird left behind at the fair, and that was the end of it, except that he took to sitting on the pithead gate each morning at the change of shift, and the men began touching their caps to him.

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Old Ruth Dunning kept a bucket of barley by her door for him. She said a bird with that many eyes had seen more of the working than any foreman, and that he would know if a roof was going before the timber creaked. When the lamp-room boy called it nonsense, Ruth only pointed at the tail, which the bird had fanned that frosty morning, every feather ringed with dark green and a bright blue eye, all of them turned towards the shaft.

On the night of the fall, the peacock would not settle. He screamed from the gate until the bell rang, then he flew at the back window of the Dunnings' cottage and beat his wings against the glass until Ruth got up, lit the lamp and followed him out. The deputy at the second junction had already turned his crew back when that cry came down the air shaft, so every man who went down that night came up again.

Ruth died the winter the seam closed, and the bird went quiet after that, or so people said, since nobody saw him on the gate again. But the men still left one feather on the pithead rail at each change of shift, a green one with a blue eye at its tip, and no one ever admitted to putting it there. Tom Oakley's boy, who grew up to be a deputy himself, kept the first of them pinned inside his lamp box until the day he retired.