Neo-traditional tattoo on the upper arm inside an ornate gold frame, showing a black silhouette of a woman with a horned or feline head, beside a photo of scarred skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Framed silhouette tattoo on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows raised, healing scar tissue on an upper arm with no tattoo visible. The right panel shows a colour tattoo inside an ornate gold-and-yellow oval frame, with a black silhouette of a woman with a horned or feline head against a grey, shaded background. The figure has bold outlines and solid black fill, with soft grey shading and flowing hair, and the tattoo is placed to cover the scarred area shown on the left.

Neo-trad Upper arm Woman Silhouette Frame Cat Hair Scar

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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 find the frame at the bottom of the flour bin on the third night out of Hull, wrapped in a tea towel that smells of tallow. Gold leaf flakes from its scrollwork and the glass is smeared with a thumbprint that isn't yours. Behind it, grey water is brushed in quick, impatient strokes, and rising out of it is a woman in black, thin as a cut-out, her hair pouring over the rim like weed.

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Cookie Ransome, who had the galley before you, never hung anything above the range and never let a loaf go into the oven without a pinch of salt thrown over the left shoulder. You do neither, and that is probably why, on the fourth night, the shape in the frame has turned its head. It has ears like a cat's and a curl of horn above them, and when the ship lurches it leans forward to inspect the bread proving under the cloth as if it has opinions on the crumb.

It doesn't speak. It taps the glass with one long finger, then taps the bread board, and you understand that she wants the heel of the loaf. You cut it and set it on the sill. By morning it is gone, and so is the ache in your wrists from the sack flour, and the gale that had been tearing at the funnel has swung round to the east as if someone had given it a sharp word.

At Liverpool you hang the frame back in the flour bin, out of habit. When you lift the cloth the next morning the dough has risen twice over, and the grey water in the painting sits a finger's width higher against the gilt than it did before.