Drawn tattoo design of a pale woman with closed eyes and red lips beside a masked face, with flowers and flowing black and red hair, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and mask with red hair and flowers

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

The design shows a pale woman with closed eyes, red lips and flowers tucked into her dark hair, with a second masked face with closed eyes overlapping her lower half. The linework is bold and the shading is soft grey, with the lower hair and lips picked out in red. The composition is a tall vertical figure on a plain grey background.

Neo-trad Woman Mask Flower Hair Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthkennick would let the Blessing go ahead with a painted face that looked at the water, so every autumn the mummers dressed the prow of the Good Intent with a carved woman whose eyes stayed shut. My aunt Mags had carved this one from a fallen ash, and I was the one who held the lamp while she gave it lips the red of pickled beet.

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The trouble started when the mummers' mask went missing from the net loft. It was a thin papier-mâché face, grey as a gull's breast, with eyelids painted down like a sleeper's. Ferris swore he'd hung it on the nail beside the lilies we'd bound for the bow. Then Saul Trewin turned up at the slipway with a fistful of white flowers he couldn't account for, and a length of red wool caught in the buttons of his oilskin.

I found the mask at first light under the ash tree, face down in wet leaves, a smear of red wax on its mouth. When I turned it over, the sea behind the breakwater was flat and pale as a plate. Someone had stitched red wool across the eyeholes, neat as a seam, and I stood there with the cold coming through my boots, understanding that the Blessing had never been about keeping the boats from seeing the water. It was about the village agreeing not to look too hard at its own face.

We launched the Good Intent that afternoon with the lilies in her bow and the mask nailed to the wheelhouse door. The lads asked who'd sewn it shut. I tied the last knot myself and said nothing, and the wool was still warm from my hands when the tide turned.