Black line drawing of a stylised bird with a crested head and long, eye-tipped feathers in a tail, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Stylised bird with long feathered tail

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised bird with a spiked crest, a long curved neck and a beak is drawn in bold black linework on a plain white background. Its tail is made of long, tapering feathers with spiral eye shapes at the tips, and smaller curved strokes fill the feather bodies. The drawing is monochrome and the composition is a single vertical figure with no body part visible.

Bird Peacock Feather Crest Tail

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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

Dear Win, you will not believe what the Carrow boy left behind when he slipped out before dawn owing me eleven shillings. Under his bed was a tin trunk, and in it a folded sheet of thick paper, the sort the printers by the pier use for handbills. On it he had drawn a bird in black ink and nothing else, its neck bent as if it had just swallowed something bitter. Its crest rises in spikes like the frost on the bathroom window, and its tail falls down the page in long feathers, each one ending in an eye that stares straight out at you.

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I pinned it above the hall clock to see whether anyone would claim it. Mr Hasler from the second floor stopped to look on Tuesday and said the bird was a peacock that had been dragged backwards through a hedge, and that the eyes gave him the willies. Then the drops started. Little black beads fall from the beak, one a morning, and each morning the paper is a shade damper near the bottom where the feathers end. I have stopped asking how that happens.

Yesterday I finally opened the trunk properly and found a second sheet beneath the lining. It was the same bird, but the tail was empty, every feather unfinished, as though he had run out of patience or ink. Pencilled along the margin in a schoolboy's hand were the words keep them looking at the sea.

So this morning I took the bird down and propped it in the front window, facing the water. The tide was out and the sand lay flat and grey, with nobody on it but a gull. The eyes on the feathers were all turned the same way, patient and wide open, waiting for the boy to come back up the road and settle what he owes.