Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman in feathered headdress with roses on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A traditional style tattoo shows a woman in profile wearing a dark headdress with a red feather, pale scalloped trim and a gold jewelled brooch. Two red roses and a yellow flower sit around her, and a small ribbon or banner shape appears at the lower left. Bold black outlines and solid fills in red, yellow, green and blue are shown in two close photographs of the same arm.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Woman Profile Headdress Feather Rose Flower Pearl Earring Jewel

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the wet week before the fair, Mabel Crane kept a flower barrow at the foot of Cutler Street market, where the rain ran off the awnings in strings. She sold roses that came up on the night train from the glasshouses at Spalding, and she sold them cheap, because nobody buys flowers in the rain. A man with a terrier asked why she still wore the feathered hat her mother had brought back from a travelling show. She said the hat kept the wet off her neck, and that was all she had to say about it.

Keep reading

On the Thursday a stranger came under the awning with a brooch in his palm. It was gold, with a red stone set in the middle, and he said it had been his grandmother's and he needed it sold for the price of a dinner. Mabel gave him two roses for it and told him the brooch was worth more than the flowers. He said that was the trouble with brooches. Then he bought a yellow primrose he did not need, paid for it in pennies, and walked off up the hill without his umbrella.

The forecast said the rain would last until Sunday, but it stopped at four that afternoon, and the gutters went quiet. When Mabel took off her hat to shake it out, the brooch dropped into her lap, warm as a coin left in a pocket. The roses in the barrow had all opened at once, red as the stone, though they had been tight buds at noon. Nobody at the market could say who had sold her the brooch, and the man with the terrier swore he had seen no one at all.

Mabel pinned the brooch back on her hat and never took it off again. On wet days after that, her barrow sold out before noon, and she always gave the first rose away for nothing.