Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman in a feathered headdress on the ribs, with grey rose tattoos visible on the upper arm above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered headdress portrait on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman wearing an ornate feathered headdress with a beaded band, shown from the shoulders up and facing forward. The image uses fine grey shading and detailed linework for the hair, feathers and facial features, with soft tonal gradients across the skin. Rose tattoos in grey shading are partly visible on the upper arm at the top of the frame, and the composition is a close side view of the torso.

Realism Ribs Upper arm Woman Portrait Headdress Feather Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone cracked along its grain the week before Christmas, and Mr Hollis said we could not pull the Whitby order from it. So I spent the short afternoons at the bench at Crowther's, with the gas hissing and the yard outside gone white, copying a portrait off a card that had come in from a dealer in Leeds. Its gradients were the trouble. Black ran into grey so softly you could not find where one ended, and a lithographer has to find that place, because the stone takes only what you draw on it and nothing in between.

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The card showed a woman under a crown of long feathers, a band of beadwork across her brow, her face turned straight out at the viewer. Nobody had written a name on the back. Mr Hollis called her 'the Chief's Daughter' for the benefit of customers, then looked embarrassed when I asked whose daughter she was. I drew her three times on tracing paper before I trusted my hand. The fourth time I used the crayon, pressing so lightly the lines broke into dots, and somewhere in the shading the feathers stopped looking like feathers and became weather moving over a field.

On the last Friday before the new year the stone came back from the grinder smooth as a plate. I laid the tracing down, rubbed the greasy crayon on, and waited for the acid to bite. When I lifted the first proof, the rose border I had drawn in the margin came up in a dark, even blush, and above it the face surfaced slowly out of the grey, eyes first, then the mouth, as if she had been waiting under the stone for someone to ask.

Mr Hollis carried the proof to the window and held it up to the snow. He said nothing for a long time. Then he folded it once, put it in his waistcoat pocket, and told me the Whitby order could wait until spring. 'Keep the stone,' he said. 'We'll pull her for ourselves.'