Two neo-trad colour tattoos on a pair of calves, each showing a woman with closed eyes, a jewelled headdress and flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ornate female portraits on calves

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two portraits of women with closed eyes sit side by side on the calves, each wearing an ornate headdress hung with beads, jewels and chains. The left figure has a golden crown-like headdress and red and amber jewels, while the right has white flowers, a red bloom and a green pendant. The shading is smooth and painterly with bold outlines, and the colours include red, amber, green and brown against a pale background.

Neo-trad Calf Woman Portrait Headdress Flower Jewel Bead Necklace Pendant Chain Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house on Gull Terrace had two sisters' names painted over its door, though only one of them ever answered to them. Mrs Ottilie Vane kept the bedrooms and the ledger. Her younger sister Hester kept the garden, the bees, and the pear tree that grew crooked against the north wall, and nobody in Shingle Bay could remember it fruiting.

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Every August the sea came up the lane as far as the chapel steps, and the sisters went down to meet it with their hair braided and their eyes shut, as their mother had taught them. Ottilie wore the gold circlet her husband brought home from a wreck sale in Cornwall, hung with garnet drops that clicked when she walked. Hester wore daisies and a red poppy pinned above her brow, and a pear-green stone on a cord, which she said was the only thing of value the tide had ever given back.

One year the tide did not turn. Ottilie counted the lodgers and found one short, a Mr Amos Pell who had taken the attic room in spring and paid in silver. His door stood open, the bed made, a single cold pear on the sill. Hester bent over it and said the sea had taken its rent early. Ottilie took off her circlet and laid it on the water-stained step, and the lane was dry again by morning.

Afterwards the lodgers at Gull Terrace paid their rent in advance, and nobody asked why the pear tree bore fruit each August, or why the sisters never again let anyone sleep in the attic. The circlet still hangs in the hall, its garnets rubbed bright by the hands of those who touch it for luck.