Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile portrait with scrollwork on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's head in profile, with eyes closed and an ornate earring, is rendered in solid black and grey. Her hair flows into swirling black scrollwork and feathered flourishes that wrap down the thigh. Bold black fills contrast with fine grey detailing on a plain dark background.

Neo-trad Blackwork Thigh Woman Profile Portrait Hair Earring Scrollwork Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's lodge at Harrowgate had been empty for eleven winters when Aunt Hester sent me up the hill with a lamp and a bad temper. The keep had lost its roof to a storm the year before, and rain had found every seam in the old stone. I was there to measure the great window, not to be frightened of it, but the carved head above the arch made me stop anyway.

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She was cut in profile, eyes shut, as if she had been asleep when the chisels finished with her. A round pendant hung from her ear, heavy as a coin. Her hair did not fall the way hair falls. It lifted off her skull in long curls, broke into leaves, then into feathered scrolls that ran down the jamb and vanished into the moss. Someone had worked it with a patience I have never possessed.

Hester told me the story over tea that night. The lord had paid his mason in timber and grazing rights to carve his wife, who had gone out on the tide one March and never come back. The mason made her face perfect, then gave her hair the wind it had lost. Every gust through the courtyard sounded, he claimed, like her breathing out. The lord grew tired of the sound and had the mason's hands bound, so the scrolls were left unfinished at the crown.

Next morning I found a fresh chip of stone on the window sill, pale as a tooth. I wrote in my ledger: one head, profile, hair in leaf, crown unfinished. Then I left the chisel where I had found it and did not look up at her again.