Colour traditional tattoo of a woman with peacock feathers and a rose in her hair, wearing beaded necklaces, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional woman with peacock feathers on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A woman with dark curled hair, a pink rose and two blue peacock feathers in her headdress, and orange drop earrings, is shown in bold outlines. She wears layered red beaded necklaces and a teal top, with solid red, orange, yellow and teal fills and soft red blush on the cheeks. The image is a three-panel collage, with the central view showing the full tattoo on a calf and side panels showing close crops of the face and necklaces.

Traditional Calf Woman Peacock feather Rose Bead Necklace Earring Headdress Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Stroud would not let me touch the feathers until she'd had her tea. They had come up from Plymouth in a hatbox that reeked of paraffin, two long blue-green plumes with eyes at their tips, and she sat at the dressing room glass of the Gaiety Palace with the gas jets ticking, turning them this way and that as if checking a horse's teeth. 'Pin them high, Ada,' she said. 'High enough that the back row can see what they paid for.'

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The rest of the company had gone home by eleven. I stayed to press the sequins on the chorus costumes and listened to her talk about Mr Dorrance, who had promised her a house in Hove and given her a string of red glass beads instead. She wore three strands of them that night, knotted at the throat, and when I asked whether they were real coral she laughed and said coral was for women who had never been stung.

At half past one the stage manager knocked to say the Chief Constable's wife had come in early, so Mrs Stroud must go on in twenty minutes with her face half done. She stood, tugged the orange drop earrings straight, and pressed a pink silk rose into my hand. 'Keep that,' she said. 'The eyes will look tired from the back, but the rose never does.'

I heard her voice from the wings, lovely and unhurried, and I watched the spotlight find the rose in her hair as the band struck up. Then the house went dark, the curtain rose, and I was left behind the flats with a flower, a basket of unpressed sequins and the smell of paraffin that never quite left the hatbox.