Black linework flash design of a woman in a headscarf with a peony in her hair and a red skull outline across her lower face.

Headscarf woman with peony and skull face

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A line drawing of a woman in a headscarf, with a peony and leaves tucked into voluminous, hatched hair that curls down one side. Her face is drawn with closed, heavily lashed eyes, and her lower face is replaced by a red-outlined skull. The design uses bold black outlines and fine parallel hatching, with purple accents on the flower stamens and blue marks near the scarf.

Neo-trad Woman Headscarf Peony Flower Skull Hair Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrit had sold four headscarves by ten o'clock, which on Skerra counted as a good morning. The only lane on the island ran past her mother's shop, and the shutters stayed half down against the wind. Tourists off the Tuesday ferry wanted something to tie over their hair before the climb to the lighthouse. She sold them plain blue cotton, or with a border of hand-stitched shells, and she never sold the one folded at the bottom of the drawer.

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That one was printed with a peony, the last bloom from the wall garden, pressed flat in her grandmother's recipe book and copied in ink onto the cloth. Beneath the flower, a skull had been worked in red thread, grinning out of a fold. Her grandmother had said the sea took what it was owed, and a little bone-coloured joke kept it civil. Dorrit never understood the joke. She understood the thread, which had cost her a fortnight of evenings and a sore thumb.

On the last Tuesday in August a man came in from the mainland with a sketchbook under his arm and asked, very politely, for the scarf with the flower. He turned it over in the light from the door and traced the hatched lines with one finger, as if counting them. He wanted to copy it, he said, and he would pay for the honour. Dorrit thought of the ferry timetable and the long winter the island had ahead.

She folded the scarf into a square, pressed the crease with her palm, and set it on the counter. "Draw it from the outside," she said. "The skull stays in the drawer." He laughed, paid double, and left. When the boat had gone past the headland, she went back to the drawer, lifted the cloth to the window and watched the red thread catch the last of the sun.