Quoted By:
>Peacocks, on the other hand, have been employed as a symbol of male queer desire for thousands of years in the Western tradition. “The peacock is very flamboyant and not afraid of showing off and shaking his tail feathers. He is bedazzling, ornate and over the top,” says Anna Phylactic, a Drag Queen from Manchester, England. “And look honey, of course peacocks are queer — the word COCK is in their fucking name!” In terms of body art, the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus (484– c.425 BCE) makes note of men on certain islands off modern Spain and France who “did adorn their forearm with images of the male cock, to signal with its feathers a lust for their fellow man.” While the evidence is more speculative, rudimentary peacock tattoos have been found on pairs of Viking men who were interred together in Scandinavian bogs, a rare form of joint-burial that has led some researchers to conclude that the individuals were life-partners before their death. In the early days of modern tattooing, queer Victorian dandies and closeted circus strongmen equally inked themselves with male peacocks, and this carried over into the 20th Century. In the 1940s and 50s, in fact, peacock tattoos were one way that queer sailors in the U.S. Navy identified each other — especially ones who had served at Mediterranean ports — and the practice still continues today among some naval personnel, albeit on a smaller scale. Historically, the peacock tattoo has endured as one of the most unapologetically queer images that a man could permanently put on his body — and if contemporary social media is any indication, it’s a tradition that is fiercely being revived by more and more Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha gays.
from Simon Collin’s new book “Queer Ink: Gay Men and Their Tattoos” (2025), p. 177.
