Black ink drawing of a stylised peacock with eye-marked tail feathers, shown as a tattoo design on lined paper with no body placement visible.

Stylised peacock tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A simple black line drawing of a peacock with a raised crest, a curved neck and a solid black body. Its long tail feathers end in teardrop shapes, each with a white centre and a black eye. The bold, clean linework sits on a sheet of lined paper, with no shading and no colour.

Peacock Bird Feather Tail Crest Eye

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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

The crate arrived on the Tuesday boat, stencilled with a shipping line's name nobody on Gullhaven could pronounce, and the bird inside screamed like a gate being dragged over stone. Mrs Ferrier signed for it. I was the one who had to carry it up the 112 steps to the lamp room, because the lamp room was the only place on the rock with a door that shut against the wind.

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The purser called it Ansel, though he never said who had given it the name. It would not eat the herring my father threw. It stood on the gallery rail with its crest raised like a man listening for a telegraph, and every evening at dusk it walked the iron grating dragging its tail so the light caught the eyes in the feathers. Black and white, teardrop-shaped, the same as the lens rings turning above our heads.

In February the gale took the mainland cable and the relief boat did not come for nineteen days. I kept the lamp trimmed and the log up to date on loose lined paper, because the ledger had been soaked through. On the fourth night I found the bird in the lamp room, wings half open, its tail fanned against the brass. It had climbed the stairs on its own. I think it had been trying to keep watch.

When the relief boat finally rounded the point, the captain counted our lights before he counted us. He saw the lamp burning, then the bird on the rail, and he laughed until he had to hold the railing himself. That night I drew Ansel on the back of the log sheet, careful with the crest and the curve of the neck, and I gave the tail its eyes so the men in the boat would know the way home.