Black line drawing of a peacock with eye-spot feathers and a mandala behind its head, drawn on tracing paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peacock with mandala halo design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a peacock with its head turned to the right, a detailed eye, and long tail feathers fanned out across the page. A mandala-style pattern of petals and fine radiating lines sits behind the head, and the feather eye-spots are outlined in single consistent strokes. The design is drawn in black on pale tracing paper, with a Micron fineliner pen resting at the upper left.

Fine line Geometric Peacock Bird Feather Eye Mandala Flower Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning on the Harriet Vane, before the forenoon bell, the clerk Tobiah Greer went down to the hold with a lantern and counted the eyes in the peacock's tail. There were a hundred and nine. The owner in Bristol had said that if one went missing, the difference would come out of Greer's wages. The bird watched him back with its head turned to the right, as if the ship were about to tell it something.

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Past the Cape the sea went the colour of pewter and the bird would not eat. Greer sat with it in the dark and talked about his mother's kitchen in Cornwall, where a ring of painted tiles hung above the window like a sun. Then he saw the fine lines behind its head drawing themselves outward, petal over petal, like spokes turning slowly. He thought it was the lantern. He carried it up on deck to be sure.

The watch saw it too, a pale halo spreading over the mainmast. The wind came round out of the north-east and filled every sail at once, though no one had called for it. They ran before it for three days and came into Madras with the cargo dry and the masts sound.

The owner was pleased with the price the bird fetched and not at all with Greer's account of it. On the last night at anchor Greer went down and found the cage empty, its door open on a single black feather laid in the straw, with one eye looking up at him. He did not count it. He put it in his pocket, and it is still there.