Two matching black cameo silhouette tattoos in ornate frames sit on the upper thighs, drawn in a bold black ink style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching cameo silhouettes on thighs

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos show a profile silhouette inside an oval cameo frame, with a decorative scrolled border around each. The solid black silhouettes contrast with fine outlined ornament and a small dot above each frame. The ink is black only, and the two designs are placed side by side on the skin.

Traditional Blackwork Thigh Cameo Silhouette Profile Frame Ornament Scroll Matching pair Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paper was already warm from the lamp when Hettie Marsh lifted the second sheet and found the profile had come out wrong. The chin sat a shade too high, the way a man holds his head when he is pretending not to listen. She laid the scissors on the tailgate of the wagon and looked out across the road, where the heat rose off the flats in long wavering sheets.

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The sitter had been waiting since noon under a strip of canvas. Her name was Ada Quill, and she had come in from the mining camp at Sallow Wells carrying two brass mounts, each the size of a crown piece, with a request Hettie had not expected. Cut her twice, Ada said. Once for me and once for my sister, who is in Tucson now and will not be coming back. Hettie had cut silhouettes for thirty years, in tents and saloons and once in a church vestry, and she knew the difference between a face a person wanted and a face a person remembered.

She turned the sheet to the window and cut again, slowly, keeping the line of the nose clean and the lashes soft, until the profile matched the first one she had made from Ada's description. Then she pasted both onto black card and fitted them into the oval mounts, and the scrolled brass caught the light like a watch being wound.

When Ada took them she held them up one after another against the sky. Both faces looked away from her, toward the same empty point on the horizon. "They always do that," Hettie said. "Never once looking at the one holding them." Ada closed her hand around the mounts and walked off down the road towards the camp without thanking her. Hettie found she had cut a third profile without meaning to, a small one, looking the other way.