Black and grey feather headdress portrait tattoo on the upper arm of a woman in a black bikini, with a small triangle tattoo near the top of the shoulder.

Feather headdress portrait on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black bikini and silver chain jewellery is photographed from the side with her head cropped out of frame. The main tattoo is a black and grey portrait of a woman wearing a feather headdress, shaded with fine detail on the upper arm. A small outlined triangle sits near the top of the shoulder and neck, and the warm, even light shows the shading and linework clearly.

Upper arm Portrait Triangle Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls are already screaming over Porthkennack harbour when you reach the fish market, and your uncle Declan has the Mary Ellen's engine turning before you've buttoned your oilskins. He doesn't look up from the crate of gurnard he's icing. "Your gran left this for you," he says, and slides across a square of card gone soft at the corners. Inside is a pencil portrait of a woman wearing a headdress of long feathers, shaded so finely you can count the barbs on each one.

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She drew it in the net loft the winter the pilchards failed, Declan tells you, with a stub of carpenter's pencil and a jam jar of tea going cold beside her. She used to say the feathers were for the boats that had gone out and never come back, one feather for each name she could remember. There are more feathers than you expected. You stand on the quay with the card in your hand while the tide slaps the hull below and try to count them, and lose your place twice.

Past the breakwater the wind gets under the card and lifts a feather clean out of the drawing. It skates across the wheelhouse floor and you catch it against your boot. It is not pencil at all but a real gull feather, grey and white, pressed flat by years between paper. You tuck it into the frame above the chart table, beside the tide tables and the photograph of your gran laughing on the slipway. Behind you the other boats are coming out of the mist one by one, and you keep a tally of them on the back of the card.