Black line drawing of a woman with her hair in an updo and a hoop earring, shown as a single-weight fine line design on a white background.

Line drawing of a woman with an updo

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single-weight black outline shows a woman from the shoulders up, with her hair gathered into a high bun and a hoop earring visible. Her face has no features drawn, and the shoulders and neckline are described with simple, unbroken strokes. The design is in black ink on white with no shading or colour.

Fine line Woman Updo Portrait Line drawing Shoulder

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came over Harrow Gap a week early, and Maud Ashdown was still on the wrong side of it with a mule, two sacks of salt and a boy who would not stop crying. She had pinned her hair up high that morning, the way her mother had taught her, so the wind could not tear it loose. Now she stood on the shelf of rock where the path forked and could not tell which fork had the cairn.

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Her grandmother had spoken of the cairn-woman, who once lived in a stone hut above the pass. She was never seen without her hair wound tight and a single brass hoop in her left ear. Every winter she walked the ridge ringing a handbell, and every winter someone came down alive because they heard it. Nobody had heard that bell in forty years. Maud did not quite believe in her, but she had nothing else to try.

She could hear only the wind. So she took the hoop from her ear, the brass one her father had bought in Kendal that she had never once taken off, and she struck it against the stones of the cairn. Tink, tink. The sound was small and mean in all that white. The boy stopped crying to listen. Somewhere below them, a bell answered, faint and slow, from a place none of them had known was there.

They went down behind that sound until the ground levelled and the lamps of Thwaite showed through the snow. In April the carters found the hoop pushed into a crack of the cairn, bent a little but whole. Nobody in the valley could say who had put it there or who had been ringing the bell all those years. Maud kept her hair up anyway, and she said nothing about it at all.