Neo-traditional tattoo on the side of the ribs showing a woman with dark wavy hair, a small otter and autumn oak, maple and ivy leaves in red, orange and olive.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with otter and autumn leaves on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A stylised woman with dark wavy hair and heavy eye makeup is framed by orange and red autumn leaves, with a crescent earring at her ear. Beside her sits a small grey and cream otter, and oak leaves in rust and olive fill the lower part of the design. Bold outlines and smooth shading give the piece a neo-traditional finish, with a mostly colour palette set against the lighter skin around it.

Neo-trad Ribs Woman Portrait Autumn leaves Maple leaves Hair Earring Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The otter came up through the broken ice at the bottom of the lower field the week the frost first held, and my father swore it was the same one that had taken half his trout the summer before. I didn't argue. I was too busy trying to shift the byre door, which had frozen shut against a drift of oak leaves blown in from the copse since October. They were rust and olive, stiff as tin, and I had been sweeping them out every morning as if that might slow the winter down.

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Aunt Iris had lived in the cottage at the top of the farm before she left for Whitby with a man who sold ice cream. She left a shoebox of things she said she'd come back for, and in it was a single brass crescent earring, its little glass bead gone cloudy. I wore it on the days I went down to the water. Nobody asked why. Dad only said the otter liked shiny things, and I suppose it did, because the next morning it was sitting on the flat stone by the sluice, watching me the way a neighbour watches someone who owes him money.

I thought about telling Dad to set the trap, but the eels had stopped running in January and the creature looked thin enough that feeding it seemed like the decent thing. So I left a bucket of scraps on the stone and walked back up the hill. Every morning after that the bucket was empty, and the leaves had been dragged into a neat pile against the sluice gate, as if someone had been tidying up for us.

When the thaw came in March, I found the earring lying on the stone, rubbed bright, with one oak leaf pressed flat beneath it. I never saw the otter take it. I put the leaf in Iris's shoebox, fixed the earring back in my ear, and stood listening to the brown water run loud past the sluice all spring.