Black ink line drawing on white paper of a woman with billowing hair and one arm outstretched, her body trailing into flowing wisps, shown as a design sketch and not a tattoo on skin.

Flowing-haired female figure line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on white paper shows a female figure with long, wind-swept hair and one arm stretched out to the side. Her body tapers into a long, flowing form that ends in curling, feathery wisps at the bottom. The linework is bold and fairly even, using hatched strokes for the hair and long, tapering lines for the body, with no shading or colour.

Woman Figure Tail Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been lifting the windfall apples since breakfast, and the wind has been doing its usual trick of taking your hat and returning it somewhere in the rows. Late August in the Herefordshire orchard means the Discovery apples drop faster than you can gather them, and the bees have given up on the wasps.

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Then the air changes. Down the grass alley between the Bramleys, a column of hair-thin cloud begins to pull itself upright, the way smoke does when someone opens a door. It has a woman's shape at the top, one arm flung out as if hailing a bus, and below her waist it thins into a long grey train that brushes the windfalls and sets them rolling. Your grandmother, who kept this orchard before you, said the wind here was a dancer who had lost her partner. You always thought that was the sort of thing people said to stop children climbing the ladders.

She stops beside you. Her hair lifts in curls and loose strands that fall back and rise again, and the sound it makes through the leaves is like someone turning pages in a hurry. She does not speak. She holds out the flat of her palm, as though asking for something you have already given away.

You look down at your basket, half full, and think of the ladder leaning against the Bramley. So you hand her the smallest apple, bruised on one side, and she takes it, and the feathery wisps at the end of her body curl round the fruit and lift it clean off your fingers. When you blink she is up in the top branches, shaking the last leaves loose, and the apple is gone, and somewhere past the orchard wall the wind starts up again with a sound very like laughter.