Neo-trad portrait of a 1920s style woman in an orange headband and teal feather headpiece, with pearl necklaces, tattooed on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flapper portrait with feather headpiece on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A side-by-side pair of photos shows a leg tattoo of a woman with short dark bobbed hair, wearing an orange headband and a large teal feather plume set with a blue gem. Her face is shaded in black and grey with bold linework, while the headband, feather and a small green earring are in colour, and several strands of pearls sit below her shoulders. The two views are shot against a dark background, and the bold outlines and flat colour fills give the piece a graphic, illustrative look.

Neo-trad Calf Woman Portrait Headband Feather Pearl Necklace Gemstone Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abel Gaunt had priced a great many things across his counter in Berwick Street, but nothing had ever made him hold his breath like the feather plume Vi Kimber laid down on the baize at half past eleven on a wet Tuesday. The teal fronds were still bent from being pinned, and the blue stone at its heart caught the gaslight like a drop of ink held up to a candle.

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"It's paste," she said before he could ask. "The stone's paste, but the feathers are real, and the pearls are real enough to get me to Leeds." She set down three strands beside the plume, knotted at the clasp, and tapped the orange headband folded beside them. Gaunt turned the gem to the lamp and saw the light go down into it and come back changed. He had seen paste before. He had never seen paste that looked as if it were thinking.

"Two pounds," he said.

"Five. I've been offered five by a man in Soho who wanted to put it on a dog."

He gave her three and a half and a ticket, and told her the plume would wait in the back for six months at no charge. She laughed at that and said she would be on a ship by spring, and he wrote the date down anyway, in the ledger with the cracked spine.

The plume went into the front window on a velvet stand, where it turned slowly on a clockwork wire that Gaunt had found in a dead man's shop. Every evening the gem threw a small blue coin onto the pavement. People stopped to look at it and then at their own reflections, and some of them, the young ones mostly, lifted a hand to pat their hair as if something might be sitting there. In the first week of March a woman with a sharp bob stopped at the glass longer than the others. She did not come in. She only smiled at her reflection, which wore the blue light across one cheek like a borrowed rouge, and walked on towards the Strand.