Colour tattoo of two women wearing ornate Venetian masks, one teal with a pink flower and one red and gold, framed by feathers and scrollwork in realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two Venetian masks with feathers

Realism · Colour · Photo

The design shows two women's faces partly covered by ornate Venetian-style masks, one teal with gold trim and a pink flower, the other red and gold. Feathers and dark scrollwork fill the background and frame the lower mask. The faces and masks are shaded with smooth tonal blending, and the colour is rich with teal, pink, red and gold against brown and grey shadows.

Realism Mask Woman Feather Pink flower Scrollwork Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet was two hours late on the last night of carnival, and the women of Sant'Erasmo had already tied their feathers to the mooring posts and gone down to the mole in their masks. Marta Basso wore teal, the colour of the water before a squall, with a pink flower pinned above one ear so her husband would know her from the others. Her sister Ilde wore red and gold, and she carried the lantern because her hands were steadier than Marta's.

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The old men on the island said the sea took a face it could not see, so the women hid theirs, and the sea grew confused and let the boats come home. Every year someone argued that this was nonsense, and every year the argument was had at the mole with the nets drying behind it.

At midnight the first boat came round the point with its lamp turned low. Marta raised her lantern and called out her husband's name, but the voice that answered belonged to Nico Ferro, who had lost his wife to the fever the spring before. He tied up, looked at the teal mask and the flower, and said nothing. Then the second boat came, and the third, and each man steered toward the woman who had called his name until the quay was full of feathers.

Piero's boat came last. He stepped onto the wet stones, pulled the cap from his head, and held out a single red feather he had kept in its band. "You were the only one calling," he said. Ilde laughed behind her gold trim, and out past the point the water lay flat as a plate.