Colour photo of a neo-trad tattoo on a thigh showing two winged unicorns inside a gem-edged oval with pastel wash and small stars, with purple gem hearts at top and bottom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel winged unicorns in a gem frame on a thigh

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two winged unicorns, one larger and one smaller, flying together within a faceted gem-edged oval frame. Purple faceted hearts sit at the top and bottom of the frame, and small stars surround the figures. Bold black outlines define the forms, and the background uses soft pastel pink, peach, blue and green washes. The image is a two-panel close-up, with the right panel focused on the lower part of the design.

Neo-trad Other Unicorn Heart Gem Star Frame Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Pearl kept the lift light on for me on Thursdays, even after the council stopped sending anyone to fix the stairwell bulb. Fourteen floors up her flat smelt of Pledge and cinnamon, and the tea was always stewed the way she liked it, which was the way nobody else would drink it.

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Above her telly hung a painting she'd done herself the year the block went up. Sugar-pink clouds, a sky bruised peach at the edges, and two unicorns with their wings spread wide, the bigger one carrying the smaller one tucked under its chin like a parcel. She'd framed them in cut gems, purple hearts at top and bottom, and stars scattered in the gaps, each one a different size because, she said, she'd run out of patience with the ruler by the third row.

"Your granddad reckoned they were horses with ideas above their station," she told me, tapping her cup against her teeth. "I said a horse with ideas is a pegasus, and a pegasus with a baby is a family." I asked which one was her. She looked at the painting for a long time before she answered. "The little one. Being carried home from the bus stop by someone who didn't have the faintest idea how heavy I was."

When I left, the stairwell was dark as usual, so I took the lift down with the light still on. From the walkway I looked up and saw her lamp glowing in the window, and beside it the painted sky catching the same yellow, so that the whole block seemed to have a pair of wings folded against its side.