Colour tattoo of a peacock feather in orange, pink, purple and blue watercolour washes on a lower leg, with the word rise in black script near the ankle.

Watercolour peacock feather with rise on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A peacock feather runs down the lower leg, with a teardrop eye at the top in orange and pink and an ornamental pattern of swirls, dots and small triangles in purple and blue. The linework is fine and dark, softened by loose watercolour-style washes of orange, magenta, violet and turquoise that bleed past the outlines. The word rise sits in black script beside the feather's tip near the ankle, against a dark wooden floor and a plastic-covered surface.

Calf Ankle Feather Peacock feather Script Mandala Swirl Dot Triangle Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on the Thursday market since before dawn, and the awning over Mrs Okafor's stall sagged with it. Nobody bought feathers in the wet. Mara sat under the dripping canvas with a basket of peacock quills a farmer's boy had given her in place of money he owed her father, and she counted them twice because counting kept her hands still.

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The oldest quill had an eye at its top the colour of a coal just before it greys over. When she held it to the lamp, the shaft filled with orange and then violet, as though someone had dipped it in the dye vats by the river and left it to soak. Her father used to say the dyers at the bottom of the town could make any colour but the one a person wanted, and that the peacock was the only bird that kept its colours by refusing to be looked at.

A tall stranger in a wet coat stopped at the stall in the third hour and asked what the feather was worth. Mara told him it was not for sale. He laughed, not unkindly, and said everything at a market was for sale if the rain lasted long enough. She said she would give it to whoever could make it rise off the table. He tried. He breathed on it, blew on it, cupped his hands round it. The feather lay still. Then she lifted it, held it up to the grey sky and let go, and it climbed on the wind over the stalls, bright as a struck match, turning the rain to steam as it passed. People stopped to watch. Nobody afterwards agreed on what colour it had been.