Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered headdress portrait on a side ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A traditional-style tattoo shows a woman in profile facing right, wearing a large feathered headdress with red, green, cream and black feathers. Bold black outlines define the features, and the face has soft red cheek shading. The headdress fills the upper left of the frame and the design sits across bare skin on the side of the torso, with a dark garment at the bottom edge.

Traditional Ribs Woman Profile Headdress Feather Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the rain has got into the stencil paper again, so I am drawing the feathers freehand, which Dad always said was the mark of a fool. Mrs Carrick came in at eleven wanting the lady from the back of the flash book, the one with the red cheeks, but she wanted the headdress longer, running down past the shoulder blade. I told her the ribs would take the curve. She said the ribs had taken worse.

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I measured her with a length of cotton along the bone, and while I measured she told me the feathers were her father's idea. He had been a deckhand on the Calypso out of Grimsby and came home every winter with a cap of gulls' feathers from a cook in Bergen who swore by them. Each feather was a port. She had counted nineteen once and lost the count somewhere off Iceland. I did not write that down. I wrote the thread length: fourteen inches, a whisker over.

I put the first line in at half past twelve. Red for the ports where the ship stopped long enough to be sick, green for the ones that were kind to her. She watched the needle without flinching and asked me to stop when the face came round, because her father said the face was the one thing you should never let a stranger draw twice. So I stopped, and left the cheek shading for another day.

At four she paid in old florins and asked me to leave the last feather blank. Nobody's voyage is finished, she said, and I should not pretend mine was. I shut the shop and sat with the book open at the empty feather, and I think it is the truest drawing I have done this year.