Neo-trad tattoo on a woman's upper back showing a woman's face in an ornate gold frame with a red heart.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with heart in ornate frame on back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman's bare back shows a tattoo of a woman with long, flowing hair inside an ornate gold frame, with a red anatomical heart at the bottom of the design. The linework is bold, and the shading is smooth, with grey tones on the face and hair and warm gold on the frame. The design is centred on the back, with the woman's loose auburn hair falling over the shoulders and a towel visible at the bottom of the image.

Neo-trad Back Woman Portrait Heart Ornate frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame came up the stairs of Gerrard's Yard in a crate that smelled of damp and lamp oil, and Hester Vine knew before she lifted the lid that someone had kept it in a cold room for years. The gilt was crushed at the crown, a carved knot of acanthus leaves gone dull under grime. Inside, face down on a square of green baize, lay a miniature of a girl with her hair loose across her shoulders, and a painted heart the size of a walnut tucked against her collarbone.

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The letter pinned to the baize was from a Mrs Caddick of Clifton. Restore the frame, it said, and leave the portrait exactly as it is. Do not, under any circumstances, break the wax. Hester did not break the wax. She cleaned the leaves with a sable brush and a pinch of soda, rubbed back the tarnish until the metal glowed like honey, and noticed that the girl's hair, which had been brown when she first unpacked it, had lightened to the colour of ash. She told herself it was the varnish drying.

On the ninth night the hair had grown. Not much, a finger's width past the edge of the frame, a loose grey thread curling over the baize and onto Hester's bench. She stood with the brush in her hand and understood that the wax was not sealing a heart at all, but keeping one from going on. She lifted the seal with a palette knife. Beneath it lay a small red thing, cold and perfectly preserved, and beside it a lock of hair tied with faded thread, the same colour as the one curling on her bench.

Hester sent the frame back on the Monday, re-gilded and bright, the wax left whole. The letter that came in return had one line in violet ink: thank you for keeping her company. Hester swept the bench that evening and found, caught in the bristles of the brush, one grey hair, which she folded into a scrap of tissue and put in the drawer with the spare gold leaf.