Full-colour traditional-style tattoo of a peacock with a curved neck and eye-patterned tail spanning a bare back.

Peacock tattoo across a back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A peacock with its neck curved upward and head turned to the side, with a fanned crest and orange beak, is drawn across the back and flank. The bird has bold dark outlines, scale-like texture on the neck and wings, and eye-patterned feathers in the tail that spread down toward the hip. Blues, greens, yellows and touches of orange and brown dominate the colour palette against the bare skin.

Traditional Back Peacock Bird Feather Peacock eye Tail feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell found the feather in the bottom of her uncle's sea chest the week after the funeral, wrapped in a shirt that still smelled of tar. Its eye was the blue-green of the bay on a calm morning, ringed with gold, and when she held it to the window the light came through it the way it came through the glass of the lamp room.

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The keeper's logbook said nothing about birds. It recorded the wind at four, the visibility at six, the oil burned and the boats seen passing the Carr Rock. Nell read it at the kitchen table after supper with the feather laid across the page like a bookmark. Her father had been dead three years, her uncle eleven days. The new man from the board in Newcastle would arrive on Thursday with his own kit and his own opinions about women on the stairs.

On Wednesday night the fog came in thick, and the lamp turned in its slow brass cage, throwing its beam over the water every ten seconds. Nell climbed up with the feather in her coat pocket. In the lamp room she pulled it out and set it against the glass. Each time the beam swept round, the eye caught fire, gold and then green, and far below she watched a coble's lantern bob on the swell, steering by it.

On Thursday the new keeper found the feather pinned to the logbook, one eye turned towards the sea. He left it where it was. The light went round, and somewhere out in the murk a boat answered with a single long blast on its horn.