Traditional style tattoo of a woman with a red feather headdress, blue beads and a cross, on the upper arm.

Woman with feather headdress on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's upper arm shows a bold, outlined portrait of a woman with dark hair, red lips and rosy cheeks. She wears a red feathered headdress trimmed with blue beads and holds an orange and teal cross on a beaded chain. The flat red, blue, orange and green colours sit against black outlines, and the figure is centred on the arm against a plain white top and background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat was late again, and Orla Sheen had counted the beads on her chain four times before the sun cleared the headland. Forty-one, with the cross at the end. Her grandmother had strung them from dried sea-beans and blue glass that washed up from a wreck off Scarra, and had told her that every bead was a day the sea would keep its hands to itself.

Keep reading

The headdress was older than the chain. Gulls moult red down on the north stacks in summer, and the women of Scarra pressed it into a crown each spring for the feast of the boats. Orla wore hers the year her brother Dan went out past the lighthouse and did not come back with the others.

On the third night she walked to the water's edge with the cross in one fist. The sea came up to her ankles, cold and polite, and she told it she would give it the beads if it gave her Dan back. It said nothing, which was the way of the sea. She waited until the tide turned, then unhooked the chain and let the beads run through her fingers into the wet sand, counting aloud.

By the fortieth bead a lamp showed on the water. By the forty-first a hull knocked against the pier. Dan climbed out with his hands raw and no fish, and asked why she was standing in the sea in her nightdress. Orla bent for the cross, which the tide had left at her feet, and said nothing about the beads. The next spring she strung them again from shell and bramble, and the count came out the same.

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