Colour tattoo of a peacock with a turquoise, blue and orange body on an upper arm, with a dark grey shape tattooed above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A peacock with its neck curved upward is shown in profile, with a fanned tail of blue, teal and purple feathers. The bird is drawn with loose, sketchy outlines and soft, blended colour that moves from orange and red on the breast to blue and violet on the tail. Behind it, a large dark grey shape in shaded black and grey sits on the upper arm, and the photo is taken against a pale teal top.

Upper arm Peacock Bird Feather Elephant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock over Gantry Lane had stopped at ten past two, so Nell Harrow checked her wristwatch twice before she trusted the pawnbroker's bell. Inside, the shop smelled of paraffin and old wool. Mr Okafor had laid the bird out on green baize like a surgeon's tray: a peacock in painted enamel, its neck bent upward in a question, one wing chipped along the join.

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"Forty pounds," he said, not looking up from his ledger. "For the bird. The elephant on the card behind it is no use to anyone. Grey doesn't sell." Nell had come for the elephant, the ink drawing her grandfather had pinned above his barber's chair for thirty years, and she had found it here among the clocks and the cracked gramophones, soot-dark and folded at the corners. She counted coins out of a tea tin onto the baize and took the bird instead, because the elephant had already been sold once that week and she could hear it asking to be carried.

She wrapped the enamel in her scarf and walked home through streets that belonged to nobody at that hour. Chip shops had pulled their shutters down like eyelids. A man in a dressing gown was hosing the pavement outside a launderette, and the water ran orange in the sodium light. The peacock's breast had been painted the colour of a kiln's mouth, fading to red and then to the blue of a sea at dusk, and every few steps the tail caught a lamp and seemed to shiver open.

At the flat she set it on the windowsill facing the road. Her grandfather had called peacocks vain, forever showing off their eyes to the wrong crowd. Standing there, she thought they were only honest about light, giving the fire and the sea back to whoever happened to be looking. She switched the kettle on, then the lamp, and left them both burning for the bird.