Traditional-style colour tattoo of a peacock with green feathers and red eyes on an upper arm, beside a partly visible tattoo of a woman's face on the other arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A peacock with green plumage and rows of red and pink feather eyes fills the outer upper arm, with a small red rose beside it near the shoulder. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills give the piece a classic traditional look. On the left edge, a second colour tattoo of a woman's face in a headscarf is partly visible against a plain white t-shirt.

Traditional Upper arm Peacock Feather Rose Headscarf

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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

Sit closer, the rain doesn't carry my voice past the awnings, and you'll want to hear the bit about the eyes. Every Thursday the Saltmarket flooded before the bell rang, and every Thursday a peacock came stamping up from the harbour steps with his whole fortune spread across his back. Orsino was his name. He had two hundred eyes on that tail, each one ringed in red like a lamp left burning in a window, and he was prouder of them than of anything else he owned, which was not much.

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He sold nothing, mind. Peacocks don't sell, they display. He stood by the fish crates and fanned, and the gulls walked past him as if he were a shop sign. Then one morning Hamida came down from the hill with her umbrella stall, a woman with a dark headscarf knotted tight against the wet, and she set up beside him and said he was blocking her light. She had one dented umbrella she would not give away for coin. Orsino laughed and offered her an eye for it. Hamida only held out her palm and said an eye would do, so long as he didn't miss it.

So he plucked. Every rainy Thursday he gave her one eye, and every Thursday she handed him a bigger umbrella, until the wet ran straight down his back and the lamps were gone from his tail. By spring he was bare and blue-green with cold, and the whole market stood dry under his gifts. The stallholders pinned his eyes above their tills and carried the spares home in their coat pockets, watching for thieves and weather.

Orsino walked back down the harbour steps with nothing behind him but the rain. Ask anyone in Saltmarket where the peacock went and they'll point at the grey awnings, then wink. He never wanted to be looked at, you see. He wanted someone to need what he could see, and now the whole town does his looking for him.