Red pencil tattoo design of a woman in a headscarf with peacock feathers, jewellery and a cluster of roses, in a neo-traditional style with no body placement shown.

Woman with peacock feathers and roses

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A red pencil drawing of a woman with wavy hair, a patterned headscarf decorated with a spiderweb motif, and a jewelled headpiece. Peacock feathers rise behind her, and several full-blown roses with leaves frame her shoulder and lower edge. The fine hatching and shading are in a single red ink on pale paper, with the composition filling the sheet from top to bottom.

Neo-trad Botanical Woman Peacock feather Rose Headscarf Spider web Jewellery Headpiece Leaves Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-room at Hollin Pit smells of paraffin and wet wool, and on the Friday before the Whit show Mrs Dobbs is already at the bench with her sleeves rolled, stitching the colliery banner onto a new pole. You are sent down with the tea can and told not to touch the paint. The banner shows a woman in a headscarf worked with cobweb lace, her hair blown back, a peacock feather rising behind her like a struck match. Roses crowd her shoulders, dark red, the colour of the coal dust that gets into everything.

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Her husband Walt painted it the winter the men were on short time, when there was nothing to do above ground but wait for the cage. He had never seen a peacock. He had a catalogue from a shop in Leeds and a tin of Turkey red, and he said a village that kept its lamps lit needed a bit of showing off. The men teased him that the woman looked too grand for Hollin. Walt said she was the only one in the valley who had never been down a shaft, and that was why she could look so easy about it.

In the spring the notice went up on the chapel gate. On the last morning the banner went out anyway, and nobody spoke while it passed the washhouses. You held the pole because you were the smallest and nobody thought to stop you. The wind caught the scarf and the cobweb lace lifted and settled, and you saw that the weather had already picked at one of the feathers, leaving a pale patch like a moth had been at it.

At the gate Mrs Dobbs took the pole back and ran her thumb over the roses. The red had held better than the men had. Roses always outlast the pit, she said, and then she folded the banner over her arm as if it were washing.