Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a brown tiki mask with four feathers above and peaches around it, placed on the side of the ribs.

Tiki mask with feathers and fruit

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A carved-style tiki mask with a wide angry mouth and red brows sits at the centre, topped by four feathers in red, blue, yellow and green. Two peaches with leaves frame the mask on the left and lower right, and a green leaf sits beneath it. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with soft colour blends in the fruit and mask, set against a slightly toned patch of skin.

Neo-trad Ribs Feather Leaves Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sorrel Pickering carved the mask the winter the orchard flooded, and she never meant it to end up on a market stall in Faversham. Every Saturday it sat on an upturned crate between the Cox's and the damsons, scowling at prams, its four painted feathers trembling whenever the delivery van slammed its doors. Nobody bought it. Ruth on the fruit stall said it was bad for trade, and the mask, which had strong opinions for a lump of lime wood, agreed.

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On the third Saturday of September a man in a yellow waterproof held it up to the light and said it would look grand over a fireplace. Ruth wrapped it in a page of the Kent Messenger and tucked it into his carrier bag beside two bruised peaches, as a kindness. The bag swung down the high street, past the cathedral and the chip shop, and at the bus shelter the man stopped to answer his phone and set the bag on the bench.

What happened next was never properly explained. A gull landed on the bench. A woman waiting for the 4B swore she saw the feathers flick. One peach bounced off a pushchair wheel, and by the time the man turned round the bag was empty and a trail of green leaves led all the way back to the market.

The mask was sitting on its crate when Ruth opened up the next morning, glaring at the damsons as though they had done something wrong. Nobody has been able to move it since. The man in the yellow waterproof still comes by every Saturday for a peach, and he always looks up first, and the mask always looks back, cross as ever.