Colour traditional style tattoo of an older woman with round glasses and grey curled hair holding a round fruit object, above a banner reading IT WAS A RUN BY FRUITING.

Older woman portrait with banner quote

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of an older woman with grey curled hair, round glasses and a lace collar, shown from the shoulders up and holding a round, speckled object in one hand. Heavy black outlines, solid fills and soft shading give it a classic traditional look, with a blue and white patterned garment and a red and yellow banner beneath that carries the words IT WAS A RUN BY FRUITING. The palette is bright and limited, with red, blue, yellow and green sitting against pale skin.

Traditional Woman Portrait Glasses Banner Quote Fruit Collar

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been moored at Hollin Lock since Tuesday, and by Thursday the whole towpath knew about the jam. Mrs Pinder came down the bank each morning in her round spectacles, her grey hair wound up like a cake, a damson cupped in her palm as though it were a bird's egg she meant to return to its nest. She wanted your hold cleared for the Gala. Forty jars of plum and damson, she said, and the judges could not be trusted to taste anything after the vicar's sponge. 'It was a run by fruiting,' she said, meaning the race of the stone fruit down the lock, and then she would not say what she meant by it.

Keep reading

On Friday the rain came in sideways and the canal rose a hand's width over the gunwale. You bailed by lantern while she sat on your stern box reading the rules aloud from a card, tapping each clause with the damson. Rule four: no jar may be sealed before the hour of judging. Rule nine: the fruit must be from the parish. You pointed out that the damson had come from her own tree across the water, and that the parish council had taken that tree in 1962 for a bypass that was never built. She did not look up. She rapped the card again.

The Gala ran at noon. Your jam came third, behind hers, which you had expected, and behind a lad from the next village whose jars looked like stained glass. Mrs Pinder took the rosette and pinned it to her cardigan without a word. Then she came back to the boat, dropped a single damson into your tin cup of tea, and said, 'Good try, love. Bring the spoon back in the morning.' The fruit turned slowly in the tea, dark and speckled, and you drank it anyway.