Black ink flash design of a woman's face framed by flowing hair, feathers and an octopus tentacle, drawn in blackwork linework with no placement shown.

Woman with feathers and an octopus tentacle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn design of a woman's face in profile-facing view, with long wavy hair, a cluster of feathers on one side and an octopus tentacle with suckers curling across the other. The line work uses dense hatching, fine parallel strokes and patterned fills, with scale-like texture on a lower tail section. The image is black ink on a plain pale background, with no colour.

Blackwork Woman Face Feather Octopus Tentacle Hair Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's loose, same as my knees. Sit where I can see you. You want the story of Maud Pellow and the gull-feathered coat, and I'll tell it straight, because the lamp doesn't lie and neither do I when the tide's out. Maud kept the light at Scarrow Head the winter her husband went under off the Dogger. She had three things of his: a brass telescope, a tin of tobacco he never smoked, and a bundle of grey feathers he'd pulled from the gannets on the cliff, meaning to make a hat he never got round to.

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She kept the feathers in the lamp room, beside the paraffin. Then the sea started bringing things up the shingle. Not drowned men. Ribbons of weed knotted into cords, and once, on a morning so still you could hear the gulls argue in the village, an arm of something pale and suckered, curling over the rocks as if it wanted the lamp. Maud walked down and laid her palm on it. It held her wrist, gentle as a child, then slid back under.

She stopped sleeping in the cottage after that. She climbed the stair at dusk and sat among the feathers while the great lens turned over her, and in the blue hour the water rose to the bottom step and a voice told her the sea was no bad thing for a woman who'd lost a man to it. Maud answered once. The old log doesn't say what she said. The next week the tentacle came back, and beside it a scaled tail, and the feathers were gone from the lamp room for good.

Keepers say that on a calm night you can climb Scarrow light and see hair lifting in a wind that isn't there, while the lamp burns steady as stone. That's all I know. Now hand me that flask.