Colourful watercolour-style peacock tattoo on the outer thigh, with a blue neck, orange and green plumage and trailing feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour peacock on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A peacock faces left across the outer thigh, with its neck and head in blue and its body shaded in greens, oranges and yellows. Loose splashes and soft, bleeding edges sit around the bird, and the tail feathers trail down the leg and end in blurred floral shapes. The photo is taken from the side and shows only the bare thigh and part of a striped top.

Thigh Peacock Bird Feather Flower Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock came up the Nile in a crate lined with straw, and by the time the boatmen had hauled it onto the quay at Ostia it had already moulted half its tail on the planks. My master, Lucius Varro, counted the feathers as if they were coins. He wanted the bird painted on the dining room wall of his villa above the Tiber before the summer heat cracked the plaster.

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I ground the pigments myself because no one else in the workshop trusted me with the blue. Egyptian frit, crushed and washed in a bowl of rainwater, then thinned with gum until it ran like a sky after cloud. I dabbed the neck first, a long curve that seemed to fold back on itself, and the wet colour bled into the lime the way ink spreads through papyrus. Varro shouted that I was wasting good plaster. I told him the bird was meant to look as though it had only just stepped out of a river.

The trouble came with the rain. In the third week a storm rolled in off the sea and the scaffold boards turned to mud. By morning the greens had run down the wall in long tears, the orange had pooled against the skirting, and the peacock's tail ended in soft, bruised blossoms where the paint had gone looking for the floor. Varro stood in the doorway with his arms folded and told me to scrape it away and begin again.

I did not scrape it. I took a brush of plain ochre and let the drips become stems, then trailed the feathers down into a bed of poppies and small blue flowers that had gathered where the water had gone. When Varro returned at dusk he found his peacock standing in a meadow that had not been there before. He paid me half the agreed price and kept the wall. Every guest who dined there that year asked who had painted the rain into the garden.