Black and grey neo-traditional style tattoo of a cartoon girl with her hair in a bun, chin resting on her hands, inside an ornate scrolled frame on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon girl in a scrolled frame on an arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon girl with hair pulled into a bun rests her chin on her hands, shown in soft-edged linework with grey shading on her face and hair. She sits inside an ornate frame of curling scrollwork and swirling foliage, with a fine web-like pattern across the top. The design is in black and grey and fills most of the arm in the photograph.

Neo-trad Upper arm Girl Scrollwork Frame Swirl Hand Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Skarra Holm would sit for a portrait after the Dunmore business, though the frame still hung above the hearth in the widow's kitchen. Ada Dunmore had carved it herself from driftwood the winter her husband's boat went down off the Bellan Rocks. In the middle of it she carved a girl with her hair wound up in a bun and her chin resting on her two hands, watching the door for a man who would not come back through it.

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Each night Ada set a cup of tea on the sill beneath the frame and left the lamp burning. Each morning a spider had spun a fine web across the top of the carving, and the cup was cold but never empty of its tea. The islanders said that a carved thing which watches long enough will learn to wait properly, and that waiting is the only trade a child of wood can learn. Ada told them they were foolish, and went on setting out the cup.

In April a tinker came over on the ferry with a barrow of thread and asked for a bed. Ada gave him the settle by the fire and did not sleep herself. Near dawn she heard a small sound, like a wet cloth being lifted from a stone. She went to the frame and found the girl gone from it, the chin-rest empty, the web torn across like a fishing net. The cup stood empty on the sill.

She found the girl at the slipway, sitting on the weed-slick stone with her hands folded under her chin and her bun unpicked by the wind. Ada sat down beside her without a word. Out past the Bellan Rocks a boat was coming in low on the water, and the girl's eyes did not leave it. Ada took her hand, which was cold and smelt of salt, and they waited together until the oars were close enough to hear.