Realistic braid tattoo with a red tie, shaded in grey and muted mauve, running from the nape of the neck down the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic braided hair tattoo on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a long braided plait runs from the nape of the neck down the upper back, with the head and hairline partly visible at the top of the frame. The braid is shaded with fine, soft gradients of grey, black and muted mauve that give the strands a rounded, three-dimensional look. A small red tie binds the end of the plait, adding the only strong colour.

Realism Back Neck Braid Hair Ribbon Tie

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, you'll want to sit closer, because the old hall has a draught that goes straight up the back of your neck, and I'm not having you catch cold before the end. Hear that? That's the fiddler tuning, and Mrs Pardoe on the piano pretending she isn't listening. So. The Saturday dances at the Ferryman's Hall in nineteen thirty-one, when every girl in Caddle Bridge wore her plait down her back and her ribbon tied at the end of it for luck. Ada Greave wore red. Only red. She'd bought a yard of it from the market and kept the spare end in her pocket like a lucky coin.

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Now, Ada could dance the hair off a wet dog, and that's exactly what she did, one long plait swinging out behind her in the reel, crossing the floor like a rope being hauled in. The boys went quiet when she came in. Mr Tully the wheelwright asked her three times and was refused three times, and on the third he said, 'Then I'll dance with the ribbon, if the girl won't.' Nobody laughed. You didn't laugh at Tully.

Here's the turn. At the last waltz the lamp went out, and in the dark a hand caught the red end of her plait and held on. Ada didn't scream. She stood still, counted three breaths the way her grandmother taught her, then unwound the ribbon, tied it round the stranger's wrist, and walked out into the frost. Nobody ever found out whose wrist it was. But every spring after, a red thread turned up knotted round the gatepost at the top of Ferry Lane, and Ada's plait grew down past her waist, year by year, until the spring she married.