Traditional style flash design of a tattooed circus woman with a red feather headdress, shown on a printed cushion with stars and ALIVE badges.

Traditional circus woman flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold, flat illustration of a pin-up style circus performer with a red feather headdress, red and green costume and tattooed arms and legs. Her skin is shaded with fine black outlines and solid fills, set against a cream background with small outlined stars. The design sits inside a red, yellow and black border with repeated ALIVE badges, and is printed on a black cushion edged with pom-poms.

Traditional Woman Feather Star Pin-up Tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The showman pinned his last bill to the chapel door on Thursday, and by Friday the whole of Scarra had made up its mind to go and look. The island had a ferry twice a week, one shop, and a lighthouse in want of paint. It had never had a circus and did not expect much from one.

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The performer was called Dolly Fenn on the bills, though her name was Ruth Achterberg and she had come up from a Hull tenement. Inside the tent she stood under a single lamp in a red and green costume, a feather nodding above her curled hair. Her arms and legs were written over with swallows, ships and roses, and the farmers' wives went quiet when she turned slowly for them. Nobody asked where she had got the ink. Her eyes made it plain she would not say.

The showman left on the Monday boat with the takings and the tent poles, and forgot to take his performer. She stayed in the cottage above the chandler's and kept the lighthouse lamp trimmed for her keep, since she knew a good deal about wicks. In winter the children sat on her kitchen floor and asked which ink meant what. She told them the swallow was for coming home and the compass for not being lost, and she told them the truth, that she had paid for the swallow herself in a port far off, before she could read the words beneath it.

On the first calm day of spring she borrowed the old ladder and nailed the last bill to the lighthouse door, red letters facing the sea. ALIVE, it said. The men mending nets read it aloud and grinned, because on Scarra that was one word nobody had ever needed telling.