Colour tattoo of a pale, wide-eyed girl with black hair, a red rose in her hair and red tears, framed in an oval on a forearm.

Pale-faced girl portrait with red rose

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A painted-style portrait of a pale girl with long black hair and a red rose tucked above her left temple, set against a green background inside a brown oval frame. The linework is soft and the face is shaded with smooth gradients, with red streaks running down from both eyes. Cool greens and blues dominate the backdrop, while the rose and tears provide warm red accents.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, I finished the oval portrait from Ashby Hall today, and I have not been able to put my brushes away properly since. The sitter is a girl in a green dress gone the colour of pond water, and someone in the 1880s pinned a red rose above her left temple. Her hair falls straight as a curtain. The walnut frame is split at the top, and the glass had cracked across one eye for so long that damp had crept into the gesso.

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Mrs Haverley, who owns the house now, asked me to take off the varnish and bring her up a little. I did what I was paid for. Under the grime the face was softer than any period photograph, and the lids were painted so heavily that the eyes looked wet even when dry. When I lifted the last glaze from the cheeks I found two red streaks, thin as thread, running down to the chin. Every other tear in the picture had faded to brown. Those two had not.

I tested the red with a swab of solvent, expecting it to lift like the rest, and it bled onto the cotton like fresh paint. Mrs Haverley came in with a tea tray, saw the swab, and went very quiet. She told me the rose had been replaced twice, that the girl's sister had painted it the spring after the mill race took her, and that nobody in the family would hang the picture facing the stairs.

I've hung it back on the landing, facing the wall, and I've left the rose alone. Tell Tom not to bring the children up to see it. Yours, Margaret.

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