Neo-traditional flash design of a blonde woman in a dark gown and white gloves, holding a small mouse, with a clock, a bird and a KEEP ON BELIEVING banner.

Princess with mouse in a leafy frame

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured illustration of a blonde woman with an updo and teal eyes, wearing a dark strapless gown and white gloves. She holds a small mouse in one hand, while a bird, a clock with ornate detailing and a second mouse appear nearby. The figure sits inside an oval frame of green leaves and vines, above a scroll banner reading KEEP ON BELIEVING on an aged parchment background.

Neo-trad Woman Princess Mouse Bird Clock Leaves Vine Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mice of Skerry Holm had never been asked for anything grander than crumbs, so when Orla Penhallow knelt by the peat fire and said she needed a gown for the Midsummer dance, the two grey ones on the rafter looked at each other and sighed in the way only mice can.

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The only cloth on the island was a roll of dark sailcloth from the Gannet, wrecked on the north reef the winter before. Tam, the swallow who wintered in the lighthouse, flew over to the mainland each week and came back with thread knotted round his leg. Orla stitched by lamplight while the mice nibbled the loose ends to tidy them, and the old brass clock in the harbour master's window, the one her grandfather wound every Sunday, ticked on past the hour she was meant to be asleep.

At the dance the harbour master's son, Eli Varcoe, asked her for the first reel, and she wore gloves cut from a dead captain's chest of white kid, which smelled of cedar and salt. They danced until the lamps guttered. When the clock in the window began to strike twelve she felt the old panic rise, the fear of the hem coming down and the spell running out, but the stitches held, and the mice had sewn each one with a knot that would not give until the last bell.

She stayed for the final chime and walked home barefoot along the shingle, carrying her shoes. Over her grandfather's door the words he had cut into the lintel caught the moonlight: KEEP ON BELIEVING. She had always thought them a silly thing to carve over a door. That night she understood he had meant them for the sailcloth, and the thread, and the mice.