Neo-traditional flash of a blonde cartoon woman with a tattooed arm, two bluebirds, roses and a banner reading Once Upon a Dream.

Blonde princess with roses and banner

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A stylised illustration of a blonde cartoon woman in a blue vest, with one arm raised to her head and a patterned tattoo on the other. Two bluebirds, red roses with thorny stems and a ribbon banner reading Once Upon a Dream frame her inside a green oval with a rope border. Bold dark outlines, smooth colour fills and a sepia parchment background give it a classic neo-traditional look.

Neo-trad Traditional Woman Blonde hair Bird Rose Banner Lettering Rope frame

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you. The four-ten's been cancelled since the rain came sideways, and I've got another hour in me before my knees give up. You want the one about the bluebirds? Pass me that flask first.

Keep reading

Up the line from Cold Harbour there was a halt with no name on the board, only a rose bank growing wild over the goods shed. Nobody cut it back. The porter's girl, Nell Harrow, used to sit on the bench with her ticket punch and a sandwich, and the birds would come down on the wire above her and sing the timetable back at her, every train, every minute, right on time. One dusk a ribbon of brown paper came loose from a parcel and tangled in the thorns, and the wind wouldn't take it. Nell pulled it free and read the words written on it in a hand she knew: Meet me where the line runs out.

She didn't go, not that week. The roses grew up over the bench while she waited, over her boots and her punch and her sandwich, until the bluebirds had to carry her dinner in their beaks just to keep her fed. Thirty years, they say, though I've never trusted a number that tidy. Then a signal went green on an empty track, and the bell at the crossing rang once by itself, and she woke with petals in her hair and a train already standing at the platform, lamps lit, door open.

Did she get on? Well, that's the bit the stationmaster tells different. Some say she climbed aboard, some say she stood on the step and waved until the rain stopped. What I know is the ribbon's still tied to the gate, every morning there's a fresh rose on the bench, and the kettle in the booking office is always warm when I come in.