Traditional-style colour tattoo of a woman in profile wearing a feathered headdress and a skull, shown in two close-up photographs on a limb.

Woman in feather headdress with skull

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A profile portrait of a woman with a red headband, a grey and green feathered headdress trimmed with red and orange, and a small skull at the side of the headdress. Bold black outlines define the features, with flat fills in red, orange, green, grey and skin tones. The left photo shows the full design against a plain skin background, and the right photo is a close crop of the face and headdress.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harry Tolley had painted the same woman for eleven summers and never once learned her name. The showman, Dorothy Vane, called her the Chief's Daughter on the posters and Her Ladyship in the ledger, and when Harry asked, she only said the board was older than the fair. He worked in the back of the caravan with the lamp swinging, touching up the shooting gallery board where the damp lifted the red.

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That autumn the board came back from Scarborough with the paint split along her jaw. Harry sat on an upturned crate with a sable brush and a saucer of vermilion, and found he was matching the cheek he remembered rather than the one in front of him. The skull at her temple had been painted by an old sign-writer called Mercer, who died in the winter. Harry found Mercer's pots of bone white wrapped in oilcloth under the bunk, and the skull still looked like it was grinning at a joke only it had heard.

On the last night of the season the wind came off the moor and tore the tarpaulin from the gallery. Dorothy stood in the mud with her coat pulled tight, watching Harry lower the board by its rope. 'Leave the feathers,' she said. 'Paint the eyes.' He did not ask which eyes. He dipped the finest brush and painted two dark holes into the skull's sockets, then a pinprick of light in each, so it looked back at the empty field where the crowds had been.

When the lorry pulled out at dawn the board rode in the cab beside Dorothy, its face turned towards the road. Harry watched from the gate until the red tail-lights dropped behind the hill. Nobody had ever told him her name, and by the cattle grid he had decided it did not matter.

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