Full colour neo-trad peacock tattoo with a curled neck and eye-patterned tail feathers across a person's back and side.

Peacock tattoo across back and side

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A large peacock is tattooed on a bare back and side, with its head curving up near the shoulder and its tail feathers spreading down towards the hip. The bold dark outlines and smooth shading give the bird a painted look, with teal and blue on the body and neck and layered green feathers. Each tail feather carries a yellow and dark blue eye, and the design fills the frame from top to bottom.

Neo-trad Back Ribs Peacock Bird Feather Tail Neck Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down by the range, and mind the coal dust on your sleeve, for this is a tale about the peacock that lived up at Gelli Row and the night the cage came up empty. You'll have seen the bird painted on the wall of the Miners' Institute, teal and green, its tail spread like a fan of watching eyes. Old Mrs Probert kept a real one, and folk said it had more sense than the shift bosses.

Keep reading

Every morning when the men went down the Number Two shaft, that peacock walked the slag heap and counted them through the gate. Nobody taught it. It simply knew how many coats hung on the hooks and how many boots stood lined up by the lamp room. Eleven hundred feathers, every one with its yellow eye, and not one of them ever closed.

The night the roof gave at the lower level, the bird was shrieking from the top of the wash-house roof, the way a peacock never does. Tomos Pritchard, who had a cough worse than his temper, took it for an omen and wanted it shot. His own brother had not come up at the bell. Mrs Probert climbed the ladder in her Sunday coat and held the lamp up to the tail, and the eyes caught the light all at once, green and gold, the way the lamp caught the wet rock below.

They found the brother alive in a side heading, a fallen prop across his legs and his tin still full of tea. Ask anyone at Gelli Row whose eyes they trust, and they will tell you the peacock's, though they will not say it so loud in front of the chapel.