Colour tattoo of an Art Nouveau style woman with flowing golden hair and a helmet-like headpiece, shown on the side of the body beneath a raised arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art Nouveau woman with flowing golden hair

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman in profile wearing a helmet-like headpiece, with long golden hair that curls in sweeping, decorative lines. Her face is shaded with soft tones, and a scaled, mermaid-like form appears at the lower edge. Bold dark outlines frame yellow, purple and skin-toned colour, with the ornamental hair filling much of the composition.

Neo-trad Ribs Woman Helmet Profile Scale Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell at St Brannoc's had struck two when the cooper's widow heard singing under the quay, and she knew without looking that it came from the river. Nobody in Saltmarrow went down to the water after dark. Her son had gone anyway the summer before, and he had come back with empty hands and hair gone white as gull feathers.

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The woman who rose at the bottom steps wore a helmet of old brass, dented as though she had fought in it, and her hair spilled out from under it as gold as the lamps along the wall. She asked for nothing that night. She sat on the wet stone with her scaled tail folded beneath her and combed her hair with a bone comb, and every curl that fell into the black water turned to a coin. The coins drifted in towards the widow's shoes.

The widow was not a fool. She gathered the coins and asked what they would cost her. The sea woman said only that a debt was owed, a lantern promised on a night when the tide was out, and the widow had lit no lantern for the drowned in thirty years. So she climbed the lane, took the brass lamp from her mantel, and carried it down to the steps, where the water was already waiting with its mouth open.

At dawn the coins had gone grey as pebbles. Her son came up from the harbour with a wet net over his shoulder and his white hair blowing flat, and he stopped when he saw the lamp was gone from the window. She told him the sea kept its accounts in full, and that he should never again sing under the quay.