Pencil and red-accented sketch of a woman with an updo and an ornate lace-style collar, drawn in a neo-traditional portrait style as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Portrait of a woman with an ornate collar sketch

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman's head and shoulders with swept-up hair, heavy eyeliner and full lips, shown in three-quarter view. The shading is soft and graphic, with bold outlines and scalloped, lace-like patterning across the high collar. Red pencil accents appear in the hair, eyes and loose guide lines, and the drawing sits on a pale sheet against a dark surface.

Neo-trad Woman Portrait Hair Collar Lace pattern Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-room clerk brought the drawing to our door the Thursday after the cage stuck at Scarth Drift, because he said I was the only one in Ashwell Row who could tell a scallop from a seam. It was my mother's pattern sheet, not the colliery's. She had drawn the high lace collar for my aunt's wedding and never finished the shading, so the pencil still sat grey and soft over the ribs, and the red guide lines ran off the edges where she had pinned it flat to the kitchen table.

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Every scallop, she used to say, was a place where the thread turned back on itself so it would not fray under strain. The black diamonds at the base were knots she kept for the places a rope would bear weight. I counted them that night by the range while Dad's boots dried on the rail and the whistle kept going on the wind. Nobody had told the wives yet which shift had come up and which had not.

In the morning I laid the sheet over the colliery plan on the lamp-room bench. The red lines matched the old roadway to the north, the one the company had sealed in the spring. My mother had never been underground and had never seen a plan, yet she had drawn the way through, scallop by scallop, in red pencil, as if she had known which thread would hold.

I took the sheet to the manager's office and set it on his desk without a word. He looked at it a long time, then reached for his coat. "Show me where," he said, and I put my finger on the last loop of lace, where the red line ended at a small black diamond, and the whistle sounded again.