Colour tattoo of three small birds flying above a peacock feather with a purple and teal eye, on the upper back of a person lying face down.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds above a peacock feather on a back

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Three small birds with yellow-green plumage and dark wings fly in a diagonal line from the upper shoulder blade towards a large peacock feather. The feather has a purple and teal eye with a blue centre, and its lower stem fades into black shading that sweeps off to the lower right. Soft pink wash sits behind the birds, and the bare skin of the back and a blue cloth form the background.

Back Bird Peacock feather Peacock eye Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night sister on Ward Seven said the story had come over from the coast with her grandmother, and she told it the way you would read out a list of stores: no hurry, no flourish. Three small birds, she said, lived in the reed beds below the harbour wall. They were not clever birds, but they were stubborn, and they had heard that the peacock on the hill had lost the eye from his tail in a quarrel with the wind.

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The peacock would not come down. He sat under the lamp at the top of the lane with his feathers folded, and he would not spread them for anybody. So the three birds took turns. The first flew up with a strand of violet from the dye-woman's cloth. The second carried a thread of green from the hedge where the frogs sang. The third carried a bead of blue, the colour of the sea before a storm breaks, that she had found caught in a fishing net.

Each bird flew until its wings shook, then dropped its thread on the feather as it fell past. By the time the lamps on the harbour wall went out, the eye had begun to close around the blue, ring by ring, and the long strands curled down toward the water like a hand reaching for something it had nearly lost.

The nurse stopped there and checked the drip at the end of the bed. The boy asked whether the peacock ever opened his tail again. She said he did, every morning, but only for whoever had flown furthest that night. Then she turned down the light and left him to decide what that meant.