Black linework tattoo of a woman's face in wavy hair with a smaller face below and a crescent moon, with purple and orange accents, on the upper back.

Sketched woman's face with moon on upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face in profile-like sketch lines sits at the top, with wavy hair flowing down into a second, smaller face in outline. A crescent moon hangs at the base of the design. The linework is loose and sketchy, with stippled dotwork shading in the hair and cheeks, and purple and orange washes add colour to the hair. The design spreads down the back and fills the frame against smooth skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Ilse, you will think me mad, but the Queen's portrait is finished and it is not the Queen I painted. Master Corvane set me to the hair alone, three weeks of coils and curls in copper and dusk-violet. Yesterday I looked up from the ochre and found a second face had grown out of the tresses beneath her chin, smaller, eyes half closed, as if it were sleeping in the current of her hair.

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The guild says it is damp in the gallery walls. The chamberlain says it is a flaw and wants it scraped back to bare panel. I went down at night with a candle and a stub of charcoal and traced the outline again, the way the old masters taught us, and in the morning the lines were there, still soft, though nobody had been near the panel.

Here is what I think. The moon at the foot of the portrait is not gold leaf at all. I mixed it from the ash of the lighthouse lamp that the fishermen keep burning for their drowned sons. Every stroke I laid down was made with the harbour bells in my ears. Perhaps paint remembers what the hand was thinking.

I am going to leave the second face where it is. Tomorrow I will tell the chamberlain the damp has spread, and I will carry the panel down to the harbour myself. Write to me care of the salt warehouse, and burn this letter once you have read it, as you always do.

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