Colour traditional tattoo of a woman in a feathered headdress holding a tomahawk, with red flowers below, on an upper arm.

Feathered headdress woman with flowers on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a feathered headdress with turquoise beads and red face paint holds a tomahawk, framed by a feathered backdrop. Bold black outlines, shaded greys and flat red, green and teal fills give it a classic look, with red flowers and dark leaves along the bottom. Scrollwork fills the space beside the figure.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Headdress Feather Flower Rose Bead Scrollwork Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Doreen Pask had been stitching beads onto other women's dresses for thirty-one years, and she could tell from her tin how a season would go. By the Thursday before the Winter Ball at the Palace Rooms, the teal glass was down to a crust at the bottom, and Marjorie Sowden still hadn't come in for her fitting.

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The costume was for the cabaret spot, a red satin sheath printed with poppies. Marjorie wanted a sweep of dark feathers at the shoulders and a scrolled braid curling up from the hem like smoke off a bonfire. Doreen had pinned the braid twice already. Each time Marjorie came back with something new: more shine, less weight, could the feathers lean left because the spotlight came from that side. Doreen said yes to all of it, because she had been a widow for six years and the Palace paid on the nail.

On the Friday Marjorie arrived early with her hair up and a face like thunder. Her husband Ron, who played drums in the house band, had been seen at the Ship with a girl from the wool shop. Marjorie didn't cry. She stripped to her slip in the back room and asked Doreen to sew one bead onto each poppy, one for every year of the marriage, so the thing would catch the light when she walked out.

Doreen counted them out loud. Thirty-seven. The tin had thirty-five left. So she unpicked the teal trim from her own cardigan hem and sewed on the last two herself, and that night Marjorie went out under the lights, sparkling from the shoulders to the floor, and nobody in the room could have said which of the beads had come from somewhere else.