Woman with blue-grey hair in a floral dress holding her skirt in a grassy field, showing a dark grey tattoo on her forearm.

Woman with blue hair and forearm tattoo

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with blue-grey hair falling across her face stands with her back to the camera in a grassy field, wearing a floral dress and holding its hem. A dark grey tattoo with shaded detail is visible on her left forearm, and a small tattoo with fine linework sits on her upper arm near her back. The photo has warm, natural tones with a blue sky and green trees behind her.

Forearm Upper arm Woman Arm tattoo Sky Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woad had gone to seed by the second week of August, and Ida Pell still had not decided whether to cut it or leave it for the wind. Her grandmother had always cut it at first light, when the leaves held the most colour, and carried the armfuls to the vats behind the barn. Ida had kept the vats going alone since the winter, and the smell of them had settled into her sleeves so deeply that the village children called her the blue girl.

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A peddler came up the lane that Thursday with a cart of tin pots and a face like a shut door. He wanted to buy the vats outright, he said, and the recipe with them, because the new mill in Harrow would make a cheaper dye by spring. Ida told him the recipe lived in her grandmother's memory and her own hands and nowhere he could carry it. He laughed, then stopped laughing when she walked him out to the field and let him watch the seed heads shiver in the afternoon breeze.

He left without the vats. Ida spent the evening in the field with a bolt of pale linen, pinning one end to the fence and walking backwards with the other, letting the stalks brush the cloth as the sun went down. By morning the linen had taken a grey-blue wash, uneven as a summer sky, and where the wind had pressed the stalks flat it held the shape of a bird's wing, lifting clear of the grass.