Colour tattoo of a woman with long black hair in a red dress beside black foliage, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman in a red dress on a upper back

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A stylised woman with long, flowing black hair wears a red dress and stands beside a cluster of black foliage. The figure is outlined in bold black linework with solid red fill and soft shading, and the hair trails down the right side of the design. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against smooth skin, with a partial second tattoo visible at the right edge.

Back Woman Long hair Foliage Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats came in on the evening tide, and you always knew which hull was Ellen Marr's from the sound of its engine before any lamp showed. The quay at Skerryvane smelt of diesel and gutted mackerel. You stood on the harbour wall in the red dress your mother had sewn from a bolt of cloth off a Dundee ship, because nobody else in the village owned anything that colour and you refused to dull yourself for men who came home thin.

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The brambles grew black along the wall, and the wind dragged your hair sideways like weed on a rock. Your father's boat, the Margaret Rose, was two hours overdue. Harbourmaster Kerr said the weather had turned off Cape Wrath, but you had seen the gulls go inland at noon, and gulls never lied about weather.

Ellen came up the ladder first, salt-white to the eyebrows, and said the Rose had cut her nets to save fuel and was running for the Sound with one lamp out. She asked if you would walk with her to the chapel and light a candle. You told her you would wait for the lamp. She looked at the dress and said it could be seen from the Minch, and that was rather the point, wasn't it.

At half past nine a single light bobbed past the point, low and steady. You counted its flashes the way your father had taught you, one for every sea that broke over the bow. When it reached the slip you were already wading to your knees in red, the hem floating out around you like a torn flag, and the Rose's bow nosed out of the dark toward you.