Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile woman in headscarf with roses

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in profile faces left, wearing a polka dot headscarf with lace edging, a teardrop earring and wavy hair. Two roses sit to the right and lower left, with the rose on the right the largest focal element. Bold black outlines and grey shading give a solid, traditional feel, with a faint teal cast in some shadows, and the design fills most of the frame against lightly shaded skin.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Profile Headscarf Polka dot Lace Rose Earring Hair

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Pargeter had cut the lace for forty years before the mill closed, and when the town's last weaver went to the coast, she kept the spare bobbins in a biscuit tin under the counter. Every Thursday the farm women came in with their headscarves to be re-edged, and every Thursday she told them the same thing: a scarf keeps the weather off the hair, but a good edge keeps the wind from the mind.

Keep reading

One March a stranger came up Chapel Lane with a carpetbag and a cough, asking for a scarf with dots like rain on a window. Nell did not take his measurements, because he had no head to measure, only a bundle of letters tied in string that he wanted stitched into the hem. He said his sister had worn one just like it on the day she left Ludlow, and that she had never written back.

Nell sewed the letters in. She sewed them so tightly that no one could read them, and handed the scarf over with a bunch of late roses from the churchyard wall, wrapped in newspaper. The man stood on the step a long while, turning the roses in the cold light, until a bus came grinding round the square and he climbed on without his bag.

Afterwards, the town said Nell had a sharp eye for a lie, and that was why she never once asked whose sister he was. The biscuit tin still sits under the counter. The lace is still crooked on the left side, where her hand shook that morning, and the roses are still pinned to the hook by the door, going brown at the edges, though no one has ever moved them.