Colour tattoo of a red-haired cartoon woman with closed eyes and a purple top on a forearm, with loose yellow and teal shading.

Red-haired cartoon woman on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised female figure with flowing red hair and closed eyes is drawn in black outline across the arm. The fill is loose and painterly, with yellow, pink and red washes and splashes of teal behind the hair and shoulders, and a purple top. The figure fills the frame, with the curve of the arm running diagonally through the composition.

Forearm Woman Red hair Figure Cartoon Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Tremayne had not slept since the cage came up short of the seam, and the whole of Porthkell knew it because her mother had hung the washing out at dawn to shame the night. Down the shaft, the men said, the water came in through the cracks like something listening. Nell went down to the level every morning with her lamp and her tin of bread, and every morning she left the crust on the rail for whatever was thirsty under the coal.

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Her father had been a pumpman and had drowned his lungs in the dust before the water ever took him. He used to say the sea was only a bigger mine with the lamps put out. Nell did not believe him, not until the afternoon the pumps failed and the cage stopped at the four-hundred foot mark with six men in it, and the sound that came up the shaft was singing: low, unhurried, in a voice that had salt in it.

She went to the headframe alone at dusk, hair loose and red as the brick of the old engine house, and sang back. The water lowered itself by inches. By morning the pumps ran again, and the men came up grey and blinking, saying a woman in the sump had held the cage steady with one hand while the other combed the water into ribbons of colour.

Nell told nobody what she had traded. Some nights, when the wind comes off the cliffs, the village hears a second voice under the wheel, and the rail is found bare of bread.