Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Portrait with swirling foliage hair

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman in three-quarter profile, gazing upwards with her shoulders bare. Her hair dissolves into scrolling, leaf-like ornamental forms that wrap around her head and shoulders. The soft graphite shading gives the face and foliage strong contrast against a dark background, with the swirls rendered in fine tonal gradations.

Realism Woman Portrait Foliage Swirl Hair Scroll Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been on Hollin Fell for nine weeks when Jack Ashby took the billhook to the hedge along the top field, because the ewes could not get through it and the wind came straight through the gap. He did not look up as he worked. His grandmother had told him never to look up at a hedge in winter, for the hedge looked back.

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The woman lived in the holly trees where the ferns stood dead and curled under the frost. Her hair was made of their leaves, scrolled and tight, and it rose from her head like smoke off a banked fire. Nobody on the farm had seen her face since the first Ashby married her, and he had never said what she was. He had only said she asked for the hedges to be left alone in the cold months, and that a loaf set on the stone wall each Sunday kept the lambs alive.

Jack did not believe it. On the third Sunday of February he left a loaf on the wall, went back inside and stoked the range. That night the wind dropped and the sky went green over the fell. In the morning every ewe stood in the lee of the wall, and the holly along the top field had put out new growth, tight green curls pushing from the bark like the first fronds of a fern.

The loaf was gone and the stone was clean. Jack never cut the top hedge again. When people asked him why, he said only that she liked to watch the sky, and that a woman who has to look upward all winter deserves something to look at.