Black and grey pencil drawing of two theatre masks framed by roses, beads, scrolls and a cross, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Two theatre masks with roses and beads

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two theatre masks stacked diagonally, one above the other, with a woman's face on the upper mask and a closed-eyed face on the lower one. Roses, strings of beads, decorative scrolls and a small cross fill the surrounding space. The rendering uses soft pencil-style shading and fine ink outlines in greyscale on a plain white background.

Neo-trad Realism Mask Rose Bead Cross Scroll Swirl Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The comedy mask had a split along its brow, so when Mrs Adela Crane came off after the second act with her greasepaint running, Nell Pardoe was already holding the tragic one out to her across the wings. The two masks had hung on one nail in the dressing room since before the war, comedy above tragedy, as if the nail itself had opinions about which of them ought to be looked at first. Nobody at the Empire had ever bothered to change that, and nobody had ever asked why the rose garland was always wound so tightly round the tragic mask's cheek that it left a dent in the paint.

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Adela took the mask without looking at it. 'Do I look finished?' she asked, and Nell, who had sewn every seam of that costume and knew exactly how much of it was held together with thread and spit, said that she looked like a woman about to forgive somebody, which was the note the director had wanted all along. Adela laughed, a short sound, and tied the ribbons herself. In the mirror the painted lids drooped over her real eyes, and for a moment the face on the mask and the face under it seemed to agree about something neither of them intended to say aloud.

When the curtain came down for the last time that week, Nell swept the stage alone. Rose petals from the funeral bouquet lay in drifts beside the footlights, dark at the edges where the stage lamps had scorched them. In the prop box she found a single jet bead on a broken string and a small brass cross that nobody could account for. She slipped the bead into her apron pocket and hung the cross on the nail, below the two masks, where it swung gently in the draught from the stage door.