Colour Neo-trad tattoo on an upper arm of a pale, dark-haired illustrated girl with a cross on her forehead, holding a bottle with a skull label, surrounded by orange leaves and berries.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pale girl with bottle and leaves

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pale, dark-haired illustrated girl with large brown eyes and a cross marking on her forehead holds a green bottle with a skull label. Bold black outlines and smooth shading define the face and hair, with bubbles and orange leaves with red berries around her. A purple background sits behind the figure, and the image is shown as three mirrored panels of the same tattoo.

Neo-trad Upper arm Girl Bottle Skull Cross Leaves Berry Bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the rope, love, it's wet where the lock keeper hosed it. Sit down by the stove and I'll tell you about Ada Frane, who kept a bottle on the cabin shelf with a skull pasted on its label and never once let me drink from it.

Keep reading

She came aboard the Mabel Ruth at Stourport the spring her father drowned in the weir, carrying nothing but a carpetbag and a cough. Her hair was black as a coal sack and she wore it sleeked down over one side of her face, so that only the one eye showed, big and brown and always watching the water. A cross was drawn on her forehead in soot, which she said was her mother's doing, to keep the drowned men off her. We didn't argue. Bargees are superstitious about everything but the locks.

The bottle was green glass, corked with wax. Ada said it held the last of her father's tonic, the kind the chemist in Bewdley made up for fever, and that it would be a sin to waste it. Every evening she held it up to the lamp and the bubbles climbed inside like minnows. Then one November the canal froze hard and the lock keepers went home, and Ada stopped eating. We found the bottle standing empty on the table, and beside it a note that said only: 'Tell the river I kept my promise.'

Nobody heard her go. Her bunk was still warm when I woke, and the orange leaves were lying thick on the towpath. To this day the hawthorn on that bend drops its red berries onto the path like spilt wax, and I still stop there with the tiller in my hand, waiting for a girl with one dark eye to step out from the reeds.