Two navy ink line drawings of peacocks on white, one with a fanned tail of eye motifs and one with a paisley body, in a henna-inspired style.

Two peacock designs in henna style

Colour · Flash

The image shows two peacock designs drawn in navy ink on a white background. The upper bird has a fanned tail with rounded eye motifs and spiralling curls, while the lower bird has a paisley-shaped body filled with scrollwork and a chequered panel. The linework is fine and even, with dense hatching and dotted fills, and the composition is simple with no shading or colour beyond the single ink tone.

Peacock Paisley Swirl Feather Henna Floral Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dorrin held my aunt's sketchbook up to the strip light and turned it over twice, as though the paper might confess something. Two peacocks stared back at him in navy biro, one with its tail fanned like a hand of cards, the other curled tight around a paisley body. 'Henna,' my aunt said, before he could ask. 'Designs for brides. Nothing to declare.' He didn't smile. He tapped the fanned bird and asked why its eyes were so round.

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I had drawn the eyes. I was eleven and had spent the three-hour queue with a pen that kept skipping, copying the patterns my aunt had shown me on the back of her hand the night before. Each feather-eye was a dot inside a ring, then a smaller dot, then a dash of hatching to make the ring look like it was rolling. 'Peacocks don't watch you,' I said. 'They just look like they do.' Nobody had asked me, and the officer's mouth twitched despite himself.

He let us through with the book, but he kept one page, the lower bird with its chequered panel, and wrote a number on a slip of card. My aunt didn't argue. In the car park on the other side she took a receipt from her bag, traced the chequered panel onto the back of it from memory, and said we would have to draw the whole thing again at home, starting from the tail.

That night I did. I made every eye a little larger than the last, until the feathers seemed to be the ones doing the looking, and the page we had lost stayed folded in the officer's drawer, one more thing across the border that we would never see again.