Black and grey traditional tattoo of a woman with wavy hair, two roses and tear drops on a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with roses and tears on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A bust portrait of a woman with voluminous wavy hair, two open roses tucked into the hair at the side, and dark tear drops under her eyes. She wears a beaded pearl necklace, and the figure is set against bare skin with no background. The bold outlines are combined with smooth grey shading on the face and neck, and the image is composed as a single centred figure.

Traditional Blackwork Thigh Woman Rose Hair Tear Pearl Necklace Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, lad, the wind's been at the glass since noon. You'll want the proper version of Ada Pym, because the ferrymen tell it wrong. They say she wept over drowned men, and she never wept over a drowned man in her life. She wept over paperwork. Every quarter the Trinity House clerk sent her the same letter, and every quarter she read it with a face like a shut door, then went up the iron stairs with two white roses from the widow's garden pushed into her hair.

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The pearls were her mother's, strung on red thread gone grey. She said a woman who keeps the light owes the sea something, so she wore them to climb, and they knocked against her collarbone like a count. Sixty-one steps to the gallery, a hundred and four to the lens. The black marks under her eyes were soot scraped from the wick, dabbed on each morning so the clerk would see she'd been up all night. He never once looked closely enough to see they were a joke.

Then came the January gale when the clerk climbed the tower himself, for the first and last time, and found his lamp dark and his keeper gone to the rail with the wind in her hair. The mantle had failed. She lit the wick by hand with the sea coming over the rocks below, and she kept it burning until the sun came up grey over the boats.

In the morning he found the thread snapped and the pearls scattered down the stairs, one to every step. He counted them with his boot, and the number he wrote in the log was ninety-six. The rest he never found. Every spring since, the children from the village go searching the rock pools for them, and every spring one turns up, pale as a tooth, and somebody swears it was warm.