Two traditional-style portrait tattoos of women on a calf, the upper one in black and grey and the lower one in colour with green hair and a pink shell.

Two traditional portraits of women on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The image shows two photographs stacked vertically, each of a traditional-style tattoo portrait of a woman on a lower leg. The upper portrait is in black and grey with bold outlines, a horned or sculpted hairstyle and a shaded heart-shaped base with drip shapes beneath. The lower portrait uses colour, with green curled hair, pearl details, a pink shell ornament, red lips and a black-outlined heart base with drips, set against a blue backdrop.

Traditional Calf Woman Portrait Heart Horn Shell Pearl Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the boatmen tied their barges below the lock at Stoke Weir and waited for the river to make up its mind. Old Tam Harrow always said the water was a woman who could not be hurried, and he said it to his daughter Nell the year she took the tiller of the Mary Jane at fourteen. Nell did not believe him. She believed in tides she could read and locks she could work with a bar.

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On the third night a woman came down the towpath with her hair full of river weed and a shell pinned above one ear. She asked for passage to Bristol and paid in a handful of wet pearls, which she tipped into Nell's palm one at a time. "The river wants a bargain," she said, "and I am the river's cousin." Nell took the pearls. She had never been good at saying no to anything that shone.

They went down the Avon with the current behind them, and the woman sang under her breath so the locks opened on their own. But every toll had its price. By Bristol the Mary Jane sat lower in the water than any barge should, and when Nell looked over the side she saw her own reflection had gone grey as slate, with two small horns coming through the hair above her brow.

The woman was gone when they tied up. Tam came down the quay, looked at his daughter, and said nothing. He just handed her the bar. Nell worked every lock on that river for the rest of her life, and the pearls she kept in a tin under the bunk. Some nights, if she held the tin to the lamp, the weed-green in her hair showed through the grey, and she knew the river had only ever wanted a bargain she would keep.