Green and teal peacock tattoo with dotwork shading and fine line feather detail on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock tattoo on a upper back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A peacock in profile sits on the upper back, with its head and neck turned upwards and a fanned tail of layered green and teal feathers falling down towards the shoulder blade. The head and upper body are built from fine dots and stipple, while the feather edges use darker linework and thin, curling filigree strands. The colour is mainly muted greens and teals with grey shading, set against bare skin with the rest of the back out of focus.

Dotwork Fine line Back Shoulder Peacock Feather Bird

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

The peacock came to the orchard wall every evening at the hour the bells in Market Dunsford started up, and my mother said it was the parish clock it was answering, not us. I was nine that summer and did not believe her. I believed the bird had come for the windfalls under the Bramley, and I threw it the bruised ones so I could watch it pick them over with its head held high, as if the apples had been an insult it had decided to forgive.

Keep reading

The day the gardener's boy broke the greenhouse glass, Mr Pryce came up the lane shouting for a dog or a bird to blame. Nobody owned the peacock, so it was the peacock. I stood in front of it with my arms out. He called me a stubborn little thing and went away, and the bird walked behind me in the wet grass, its tail dragging through the clover like a long green skirt with eyes in it.

It went quiet after that. The bird stopped coming at the bells, and the orchard grew over the wall. Years later I saw a feather pinned in the window of the chemist's in town, dark teal with a gold eye, priced at a shilling, and I had to sit down on the step. The bells still ring at six. I still keep a windfall on the sill for the bird, though no one has come to take it.