Painted illustration of two peacock feathers with teal, blue and green eye markings on a white background, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two peacock feathers on white

Colour · Flash

A single peacock feather runs diagonally from the lower left, with a second feather curling back on itself to the right. Both feathers have soft, wispy barbs drawn with fine, feathered strokes and layered washes. The eye markings are rendered in blue, green and orange against a white background, with the composition kept open and unframed.

Peacock feather Feather Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge was called Mercy and she carried coal up the Trent when the locks were still kept by old men who distrusted machines. Nell Harrow kept a peacock feather tucked behind the tiller bracket, the long green one a travelling showman had left in payment for a night's mooring at Keadby. He said it would keep an eye on the water for her. Nell laughed at him, then kept it anyway.

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The feather had two eyes on it, one near the quill and one near the tip, each a blue well ringed with green and a thin gold circle like a lamp seen through glass. On clear nights they hardly seemed to change. In fog they did. When the channel ran true the blue stayed bright, and when the bank was close the blue went dark as a pond at dusk. Nell learned to steer by it the way other bargemen steered by church towers, and she never once put the Mercy into the reeds in the eleven years she had it.

The November fog came down so thick she could not see the bow. Somewhere off the weir a boy was shouting for his father, who had gone into the water after a dropped rope. Nell throttled the engine down and watched the feather. The blue eye went dark, then bright, then dark again, and she turned the wheel toward the bright side, slow, slow, until the bank's black post knocked against the hull. The boy was clinging to it with both arms.

In the morning the barbs had frayed and the quill was split, but the eyes were whole. Nell pried the nearer eye loose with a penknife, pressed it flat between two pieces of glass, and put it in her tin with the locks' tokens. The rest of the feather she gave to the river, and the river took it without comment, as it took everything.