Colour traditional tattoo of a feathered headdress with beaded bands and ribbons across the upper arm and shoulder.

Feathered headdress tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large feathered headdress fills the upper arm and shoulder, with rows of brown, grey and red feathers fanning out to the right. A beaded band with triangular geometric patterns sits beneath, with a round medallion and long ribbons hanging down the arm. Bold dark outlines and soft shading give the design depth, and warm reds, oranges and browns dominate against the skin.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Headdress Feather Bead Ribbon Medallion Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had three days to rebuild the crown before the Harvest pageant, and the moths had got into the feathers. She sorted them on a bedsheet across the kitchen table, brown from grey, the rust quills from the ones the window had bleached to pink. The ribbons were worse. She soaked them in a saucepan of stewed tea until they lost their rawness and took on the colour of old toffee, then pegged them along the clothesline behind the chip shop, where the gulls watched with interest.

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The headdress had belonged to the Palace Dance Hall on Quay Street since before the war, worn by whoever was crowned queen of the summer carnival, and it had never once fit anyone properly. Mr Pike, who ran the pier lights for forty years, came by every afternoon to sit on the stool by the sink and tell her so. He said the hat only ever sat right on the head of the woman who'd sewn it, a Mrs Lillian Crane, who had died in a cold February with the thread still on her needle.

On the third evening Ada found a scrap of paper folded inside the beaded band, pencilled in a looping hand: for Dot, who laughs loudest. She turned it over twice, then went back to threading beads, because the pageant was tomorrow and Dot Pike's granddaughter had already rung twice to ask.

The girl came at ten, all elbows and hope, and pushed the crown onto her hair. It sat crooked, sliding toward one ear. Ada reached up and eased it level, and the low sun came through the shop window and caught the red quills, and a single brown feather drifted loose and settled on the lino between them. Neither of them picked it up.