Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull-faced woman with poppy flash

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A profile drawing of a woman whose lower face is a green skull, wearing a green headscarf and a large red poppy with grey-green leaves tucked into a dark bun. She also wears red beads at the neck and a red earring, and black ornamental leaves and stems curve across the bottom of the design. The bold black outlines and flat colour fills sit on a plain peach background.

Neo-trad Woman Skull Poppy Headscarf Bead Leaves Profile Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The innkeeper at Hollin Pass kept a poppy in a clay pot by the hearth. Old Tobias the carter had told her that a red flower in a winter room meant the dead would think twice before sitting down, and Mary Coyle, who had buried a husband and two sons in the same frozen ground, did not laugh at him. She watered it each morning with melted snow. The drifts climbed the shutters until the lamp oil ran low and the road to the valley vanished altogether.

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On the ninth night a stranger came stamping up from the valley. He wore a green headscarf knotted high over his face against the cold, and he asked for a room without giving a name. He ate nothing. He paid in a silver coin worn thin at one edge, as if many thumbs had rubbed it. When Mary carried up the candle she found the bed already warm, the window open a finger's width, and the poppy pot tipped on its side with its soil scattered across the boards like spilt pepper.

She knew then what the carter had meant. She went down to the kitchen, cut the last loaf, poured the last of the sloe wine into two cups, and set them on the table with the poppy beside them, its petals bent but still red. She sat with her hands folded and waited. Near dawn the cold came up through the floor, and a voice said, very softly, that it had been a long road and her bread was good. When she looked up, the chair was empty, the cups were dry, and the coin lay beside her plate.

In spring the snow went down the valley in brown rivers. Mary replanted the poppy in the yard, where it grew larger than before, and she never again laid her table without a second cup. She kept the coin in her apron pocket, and on the coldest nights she could feel its worn edge against her palm, like a guest who had decided to stay a while.