Black and grey tattoo of a girl with dark hair and a patterned collar on the forearm, drawn in fine hatched linework.

Girl portrait with patterned collar on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a girl's face and upper body, with dark hair falling across the forehead and a stylised, geometric collar. The design is built from fine black linework and dense hatching, with shading on the face and hair. The tattoo runs down the forearm, with other tattoo work visible at the top edge of the frame, and the image is in black and grey ink.

Forearm Girl Portrait Hair Collar Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The collar took Hester three winters to finish, because every time she reached the last row the wool would not lie flat. Her father said it was the cross-hatching, that a collar cut from a lighthouse keeper's grey cloth wants a steadier hand than a girl of eleven. She unpicked it and began again, counting the squares under the lamp while the herring boats knocked against the quay outside the window.

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The lamp was lit for the girl in the portrait, who had come up the coast with a travelling painter and never gone back down it. Hester had been told the face was drawn from memory, and that the painter had left it on the kitchen table in lieu of rent. The eyes were too wide for a child, and the hair fell over the brow as if someone had brushed it down with wet hands. Nobody in the village would hang it, so Hester kept it folded in the bread drawer.

On the night the wind came off the sea in one long pull, she heard the drawer rattle. She went down in her shift and found the portrait open on the table, the paper neck already bare and the finished collar drawn up round it as though someone had dressed it to keep out the cold. Beside it lay a single black thread, still warm from a hand that was not there.

She finished the last row before dawn. By morning the painter's cart was gone from the lane and the collar hung on the peg by the door, lying perfectly flat, with one stitch left loose at the corner so that whoever wore it could take it off again.