Neo-trad woman profile on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman in profile with curled grey-black hair, a teal and white jewelled ornament in her hair and freckles on her face, set against an orange sun disc. Orange spiked rays fan behind her hair, and an orange triangular shape with fine scrollwork sits below her shoulder. Bold black outlines, smooth shading and saturated orange and teal ink give it a neo-traditional look, photographed side by side on a forearm.

Neo-trad Forearm Woman Profile Portrait Hair Sun Jewel Scrollwork Ray Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and pass the salt fish along, because I am not telling this twice. You can see the sun from the terraces at Harrow Deep, the one with the orange rim that climbs over the dead cranes every morning. The old people called her Aurelle, though nobody living had met her. The story goes that she kept her watch from the mast of the last orbital ring, where the wind had teeth and the rain fell upwards, and that every dusk she leaned over the rail to comb the light down through the smog with rays of hot copper.

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Her hair was storm-grey and curled like sea smoke, and she wore a jewel of teal glass in it, the last salvaged thing from the drowned shipping market at Coldwater. The rays were what the valley loved. When she combed them, you could see your own hands again. But the Coldwater salvagers started stripping the rings for scrap, and one winter the light came down short, seven rays where there had been nine.

Her sister Mirel worked the welding gantries below, a woman with a cracked voice and burn scars on both wrists. She climbed the spine of the ring with a torch and a tin of orange enamel and did not try to mend the metal. Instead she painted the two missing rays across the bottom of the cloud base, so that anyone looking up from the terraces would see the full crown. She also painted a fine hem of scrollwork below the sun, because, she said, a thing that holds a sky up deserves something pretty at the bottom.

So when the dust comes down grey and the sun is only a coin behind it, you lift your face and you count. One, two, up to nine. Count the last two too, the painted ones, even though they are only paint. The light does not know the difference, and neither should you.