Neo-traditional tattoo of a woman's face with teal hair wrap and scalloped collar on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised woman portrait on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised portrait of a woman with pale eyes, a small mouth and a teal headpiece or wrap over her hair, set on the inner forearm. Bold black outlines define the features and hair, with flat teal and turquoise fills on the headpiece, collar and shoulder area. The design sits centrally on the forearm against a dark, reflective background.

Neo-trad Forearm Woman Portrait Face Hair Collar Wave

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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

Shush now, and pass the bottle along, because this is the bit where my knees start to complain. You want the Blue Wave Ballroom, the one at the end of Marrow Pier before the storm took the lot in 1936? Right. There was a girl who worked the cloakroom there, Ada Penhale, and she set her hair in waves so tight the sea wind couldn't shift them, and she bound it up in a scarf the colour of shallow water.

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Every Saturday the bandleader, a long streak of a man called Teddy Vosse, asked her to dance, and every Saturday she gave him the same answer. 'Bring me something the sea has kept.' He tried a silver florin, a rusted hinge, a sailor's tooth he swore was his own. She only shook her head and hung up another coat.

So one low tide he went out along the sands with a lantern and a bucket and came back before dawn with nothing but a fan of scallop shells, pale and ribbed. He spent the whole night stitching them into a stiff collar of lace and laid it on the cloakroom counter without a word. Ada put it on. Then she took his hand, walked him past the coats and down the pier steps into the wet sand, and the band played on by itself up on the boards until the tide came in over the empty floor.

They say the collar still turns up on the sand at every low tide, the lace always wet, and nobody has ever found Teddy's bucket. If you're walking the front late and a woman in a blue scarf looks at you as though she's sizing up your shoes, don't reach for anything in your pockets. Just say good evening, and let her decide.