Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a woman's face with a dark updo and red beaded headpiece, covering a full back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait across a full back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large portrait of a woman with a dark updo, a red beaded headpiece and a teal-toned face fills the centre of the back. Smooth shading models the cheeks, brows and eyes, with bold black outlines defining the features. Red floral ornaments and a red collar motif frame the portrait against the darker surrounding areas.

Neo-trad Back Woman Portrait Face Updo Flower Ornament Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

When the tide-engines of Cold Anchor stopped, the people of the lower platforms sent their oldest pilot, Senna Vole, up the cable to ask the sea what it wanted. She took three things: a jar of sea-glass, a coil of red thread, and the blue lacquer her mother had used to paint the shrine lamp.

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The sea did not speak. It sent up a woman instead, standing on the water with her hair piled high and pinned with a crown of red beads, her face the pale green of shallow water over chalk. She looked at Senna for a long time without blinking. "You came with glass and thread," she said. "Nobody brings me lacquer."

Senna asked what the engines needed. The woman lifted one hand and touched her own brow, where a single curl was painted, and said the engines wanted a face to look back at them. Senna understood then. She painted the woman's cheeks on the seawall with the lacquer, and the tide came up to meet every stroke, and when the brush was finished the water had a face.

The engines turned that night. In the morning the red thread lay on the steps, knotted into a collar, the sea-glass had gone milky, and nobody on Cold Anchor has painted a woman's face since without first asking her name.