Pencil sketch design of a woman in a feathered headdress with a large peony flower and a skull, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered headdress woman with peony sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman's head and shoulders wearing a feathered headdress, with a large peony flower at the side of her head. She has painted stripes across her cheek, long wavy hair, and a skull or animal jaw element near her chin. The shading is built from fine hatching and soft graphite tones on a cream paper background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Woman Headdress Feather Peony Flower Skull Face paint Portrait Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the wall, the lot of you, and mind the windfalls, they're bruising under your boots. It was late August, the year the russets gave up all at once. Old Mabel Thorne had the last of the picking to finish and nobody to help her but a boy from the village who'd come for the wages and stayed for the cider.

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Mabel kept a peony at the far corner of the orchard, a great pale thing she'd carried from her mother's garden in a bucket of wet sacking. It bloomed in June and was long over by August, but that year it sent up one bud more, late and stubborn, and she swore it was the same bud coming back every summer to shame the apples. A jackdaw sat on the fence that afternoon with one feather loose in its wing. When it flew, the feather stayed on the gatepost, and the boy tucked it into his cap.

That night a fox came up through the long grass with a look about it, as if it knew the way into the packing shed. It carried a sheep's jaw in its mouth, yellow and cracked, the teeth still set in it. Mabel didn't scold. She told the fox the apples were spoken for, and the fox made the noise foxes make when they are pleased with themselves, and she gave it the bad fruit from the bottom of the barrel.

In the morning the peony was open, white as a dinner plate. The jackdaw feather had gone from the boy's cap, and the jaw had gone from the step. In its place lay one perfect russet, polished like a coin. Mabel picked it up, bit into it, and said that was the fox paying its rent, and that the orchard had never once in eighty years been short-changed.