Forearm tattoo of a peacock over a vintage French text page, with black ink splatters and a faint blue-green wash behind the text.

Peacock on vintage French page forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A peacock stands in profile on the forearm, with its long tail feather trailing upwards and a fine line drawn beside it. The design sits on a printed page of French text headed LE PAON, with the lettering rendered in soft, sketchy black linework. Dark ink splatters run down the lower arm, and a pale teal wash sits behind the page, with the background showing a cabinet of vintage glass bottles and wooden boxes.

Forearm Peacock Bird Feather French text Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The inkwell went over on the second line of the entry, so the peacock on page two hundred and six has a tail that bleeds into the margin like weather. Monsieur Delorme swore in three languages and sent the boy for blotting paper, but Clémence had already dipped her pen again. She was copying the plates for a collector in Rouen who wanted every bird in the kingdom written out by hand, and he paid by the letter, so a blot was a loss she could not afford to mourn.

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The peacock had come in a crate from the menagerie at Versailles, dead three days, its train folded like a closed umbrella. She drew it at the window while the apothecary bottles on the shelf turned the light green and amber. Delorme told her the eyes on the feathers were not eyes at all but a trick of the ink, a few drops of blue laid over black until the page agreed to look back. "Nothing in nature is painted," he said. "It is only borrowed and returned."

When the collector's man came for the book, Clémence refused to scrape the splatter away. She had folded one long barb from the crate into the gutter of the page, and the ink around it had dried in a ring of pale teal, as if the paper had decided on a colour of its own. The man turned the leaf to the window, frowned, and paid for the letters anyway. Clémence kept the cabinet key and the two spare pens, and she never told Delorme that the bird had been the only thing in the crate she had wanted to keep.