Peacock tattoo across a woman's back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A large peacock with a blue body and head, a curled neck and green tail feathers marked with blue, orange and red eye spots is tattooed across the centre of a bare back. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fill the bird, with pink curled feather tips extending around the tail. The image is taken from behind, and the partly visible tattoo on the upper arm at the right edge is cropped.

Traditional Back Upper arm Peacock Peacock feather Bird Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the lamps were lit along the colonnade, you had counted the peacocks four times and got three different answers. Five birds, the steward insisted, because five was what the ledger said. But the ledger had been written by a man who could not tell a hen from a cock at ten paces, and you were the one who carried the millet out at dawn, so you knew there were six, and that the sixth had a torn blue neck and no interest in being caught.

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Verania kept the birds the way other women kept rings, for the way they caught the light and for the eyes in their tails, which she swore were Juno's, a hundred watching eyes that never slept. She did not like to lose anything that looked back at her. So when you went out past the cistern with a handful of grain, you went quietly, and you found the sixth bird standing on the old wall with its tail fanned against the dusk, green feathers ringed in copper and red, the pink-tipped plumes curling like ribbons left out in the rain.

It did not run. It watched the gate instead, the way the steward watched the storeroom, and you understood that the eyes were never really for looking at you. You climbed the wall slowly, millet open on your palm, and the bird let you come close enough to touch one trailing feather before it stepped down into the reeds beyond the ditch.

In the morning Verania counted the birds on the terrace with her finger and her lips moving. Five, she said, and the steward nodded, and the ledger came out right. You said nothing. Only you knew that a blue feather was folded in your sleeve, and that somewhere past the wall the sixth bird was spreading its tail for no one at all.