Colourful peacock tattoo with feather eyes covering the upper arm, in a neo-traditional style.

Peacock sleeve on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large peacock is shown in full colour, with its head and neck curving across the lower half of the design. Above it, peacock feather eyes in orange, green and blue fill the upper section, with the feathers drawn in bold, dark outlines. The arm rests against a blue top with white stripes, and the warm, saturated photo is taken on a wooden surface.

Neo-trad Upper arm Peacock Peacock feather Feather Bird Eye Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Marsh Farm wedding wanted the peacock, least of all the caterer, but Auntie Oona had reared it from a chick and it went wherever she went, which on the day of her great-niece's wedding meant the top table. It stalked between the trestles with its head held high, dragging a train of eyes across the marquee floor, and the vicar kept stepping round it as though it were a ring bearer nobody had told him about.

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I was supposed to be counting the napkins. Instead I found myself counting the eyes. There were thirty-one on the train, if you ignored the ones that flashed when sunlight came through the side flap, and I had got to nineteen when the bird stopped dead beside the cake and looked at me the way Oona looked at the bank manager. Then it lifted its tail and shook the whole green fan of it, and the eyes went up like lamps in a row of windows.

Oona leaned across and said, "He wants to be painted, you know. He's always wanted a sleeve." I laughed, because she was ninety-one and had a sherry in one hand. She didn't laugh. She pointed at the bird's breast, where the blue had gone dull, and said, "Tell that boy with the ink to get the blue right. It's the blue that holds them."

I still hear her when I look at the sleeve now, at the orange rings and the heavy dark outlines, and the peacock curving its neck along the bottom as if it might step out of the skin. Oona died the spring after. The bird went to a cousin in Kent. Nobody has ever told me what she meant, and I have stopped asking.