Black ink line drawing of a woman's face framed by knotted, flowing hair and feathered wings, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Winged woman with knotted hair

Black and grey · Flash

A woman's face in three-quarter view is framed by long hair that twists into interlaced, knot-like bands and curls. Feathered wings rise from the hair on the right, with a smaller feather on the left. The drawing uses fine pen linework and hatching in black ink on a white background, with no colour.

Woman Face Wing Feather Hair Knotwork Interlace Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the herring boat Sweet Agnes had one rule about rope. Every line that came aboard was knotted in the galley before it reached the deck, so that whatever wanted to slip loose in the night would find it already tied. Morag Dunnet, who fed the crew for nineteen winters out of Scalloway, said the rule had come down from her grandmother, who had it from a woman that came up the companionway one black night in March.

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The woman was dripping, and her hair hung in long bands twisted over and under each other like rope on a drying rack. Feathers stood out from her shoulders, one dark and one pale. She asked for bread. Morag gave her a heel of oatcake and a cup of scalding tea, and the woman said she had come up out of the nets, where her hair had caught in the drowned lines of a hundred boats, and that nobody on the sea would untangle her. Morag said she would try, if the woman would tell her what the bands were for.

The woman said the bands were the things a person has let go, and she bent her head. Morag worked the knots loose with a bone pick and a pot of warm fat, one band at a time, and each band that came free went into the stove and burned blue. It took until the grey of morning. When the last one parted, the woman stood, shook out her hair, and climbed the steps as if she had never come down them. Her wings lifted, and she was gone over the rail.

On deck the crew found the nets full and the sea flat, the first good haul of the year. Morag never told them where the catch came from, but she still ties every line in the galley before it goes up, and she has never once unknotted her own hair.