Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile portrait and stars on a full sleeve

Neo-trad · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in profile wearing a feathered headdress and a beaded necklace fills the centre of the sleeve, with scrollwork leaves beneath her. Stars, leaves and a dagger-like blade sit above on the upper arm. The work uses black ink and grey shading with bold contrast and a dense, layered composition across the arm.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Upper arm Woman Profile Headdress Feather Bead Leaves Star Dagger Scrollwork Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the yard pump again, and you are kneeling on the flags with a kettle of hot water, tipping it along the iron until the handle gives. Behind you the barn door drags on its rail. Uncle Ned has gone into town for feed and said he would be back before the light went, which in January means whenever the road clears.

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With your hands busy and nothing to do, you find yourself in the tack room, where the trunk your mother never opened sits under a horse blanket. The lock has rusted through. Inside, folded in tissue, are programmes from a travelling show that came up the valley the summer before the war: a chief in a crown of feathers, a woman in profile with a string of beads at her throat, and a tin star pinned to a card. Someone has tucked a paper knife between the pages, its blade gone the colour of stewed tea.

You carry the lot to the kitchen, where the range ticks and the window has frosted to lace. The woman on the cover has a jaw you half recognise, the same set as Nell from the post office, who never once smiled at you. Under the programme there is a letter in your mother's careful hand, addressed to nobody, that says only: the feathers are for whoever stays, the knife is for whoever leaves, and the rest is for whoever finds the trunk first.

You fold the letter back into its tissue and put the tin star in your coat pocket. Out in the yard the pump coughs, catches, and runs clear, and for a moment the whole farm sounds like a bell being struck somewhere very far off.