Traditional woman portrait and roses on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A woman in side profile wears her dark hair up with a flower and a decorative ornament, with roses above and below her and a crescent moon to the right. The bold outlines and solid black shading are typical of traditional work, with soft grey tones on the face and hair. Small areas of red on the lips and cheek are the only colour, and the design wraps around the outer thigh.

Traditional Thigh Woman Rose Crescent moon Hair Flower Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so Morag and I sat on the slipway with the tin of ochre between us and argued about whether the moon over Ardnish was rising or setting. She said setting. I said rising, because that was how I had painted it on the chandlery sign twenty years back, and nobody on the island had ever complained about the sky being backwards.

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Ruth Gillies came over on the Tuesday boat with a photograph folded into quarters. Her mother had been dead a year. In the picture she was young, her hair piled high and held with a brass flower, a paper rose tucked above one ear for the Saturday dances in the hall. Ruth wanted her on the gable end of the net loft, facing the harbour, with roses at her shoulder and roses at her hip, as if the woman had grown up out of the ground and was not quite ready to leave it.

I had black, three greys, a dish of white, and one pot of red I kept for buoys. I worked from the photograph with the wind getting under the boards and filling my brush with grit. The face took four days. The cheek I did last, a soft blush, and when I put the red on the mouth Ruth made a sound I will not forget. Too bright, she said. I told her the colour was the only thing her mother had ever been allowed to be loud about. She laughed and cried in the same breath and asked me to leave it.

That night I climbed the ladder to check the varnish. The crescent I had put beside the head caught the lamp from the Gillies boat coming in late, and for a moment the whole figure seemed to turn from the wall toward the water, the way you turn when someone calls your name from the pier. I came down, pulled the ladder up, and let the ferry be late again.