Flash sheet of four traditional-style portraits of princesses, each with a red banner bearing a name, set against a cream background.

Four princess portraits with name banners in traditional

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The sheet shows four bust-length female portraits in profile or three-quarter view, each with a bold black outline and a rolled banner beneath bearing a name. Red roses, red and yellow flowers, and blue-green leaves surround the figures, with fine stippled shading on the hair and faces. Solid red, yellow, blue and green fills dominate against a plain cream background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The sheet you asked after is still pinned above Mrs Keogh's counter at the harbour, between the tide tables and a photograph of the lifeboat crew from 1961. Ivo Parr drew it in August, on the back of a ferry ticket, with a borrowed pen and a bottle of red ink he swore came from Lisbon. Four women with their faces turned just so, each one wearing a rose the way other girls wear a hairpin. Under every face a ribbon curls out with a name in capitals. Nobody here has ever met a Nerissa or a Salt Mary, and Ivo says that is the point: a name only has to be brave enough to be read from across the quay.

He came over on the Thursday boat with a canvas roll and no luggage. The island took to him because he paid for his pint in drawings and never once asked after the dog's name. He drew the sun behind Mary's shoulder with rays like a child's fork, and the leaves in blue-green, because he said the sea had taught him that green only looks right next to red. On the last evening he gave Nerissa's banner a fold I had not seen before, a little twist at the end, as though the name were trying to slip off the page.

He left the sheet behind when the Thursday boat took him. It is pinned there still, and every morning I notice the twist, and every morning I think you are the sort of man who would sail back for a fold like that.

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