#peaky woman

[eyemarchshelby]

Natasha O'Keeffe new photoshoot by: Benjamin Eagle

"Some prints from a shoot with the lovely and incredibly talented @natashaokeeffeofficial in early spring" -Benjamin Eagle

[heeahheeya]

Grace is grabbing Tommy's jaw before kiss😍💋

[murakamijeva-muza]

[normalbrothers]

you watch him, linda, you love him.

[bath1lda]

i need good “she fell first but he fell harder” fanfics literally any fandom lol

[english-history-trip]

My full collection of spirited Victorian ladies from Illustrated Animated Police News (basically the Victoria's Secret catalogue of its day), originally compiled in static form by @yesterdaysprint.

[borgialucrezia]

peaky blinders — 4x03 'blackbird' created by steven knight

[cissyenthusiast010155]

~𝓟𝓸𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝓖𝓻𝓪𝔂 𝓷𝓮𝓮. 𝓢𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓫𝔂 (𝓟𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 𝓑𝓵𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻𝓼)

[prettypeppermint]

swan song.

for t. shelby. a continuation of 'the gift of silence. (how sweet the sound)'

Sacrifice was your greatest gift. It clung to your name like a drawn bowstring, pregnant with prospective yet surmounting to nothing. You gave to your family until their deaths pried your outstretched palms away; you gave to your future self through tired feet and hard-earned sweat. Now, you've given to Thomas Shelby. Your very own love language.

You would give just about anything to take it all back.

He was kissing you--tasting you. He was asking for more and more of you every day through his longing gaze and patient fingers. You hated making him wait for something unattainable.

He wanted you a certain way--pliant, moldable. Soft.

He wanted you only to take from you. He wanted to collect you piece by piece.

A giver and a God.

"Tell me," he muttered into your mouth, tasting the way your thoughts grew sour on your lips. He read you in a way not kindled through love but through years of hardened business.

You pulled away half-heartedly. Your mind wrapped around him and you needed air.

"Say you love me," you ordered, staring into the core of his glacier-capped irises. There was no hope--no apprehension. You've digested every unspoken word already. You knew.

He peered down at you through his heavy line of lashes. "What--are my acts of service not enough?" he said lowly, an air of an insatiated euphemism in his voice.

A swell.

A silence.

An atonement.

"I love you." His finger traced a lock of hair into the canyon of your ear.

"I don't believe you."

A scoff seared through his teeth--a breath through the cornice of his lips.

"I've been thinking recently. During the day; during the night"--you began walking aimlessly around his office, fingering book spines and swiping the dust off of ledges--"during that ungodly hour before work. And thank God I have, because now I know you've been lying to me."

Thomas analyzed you--dissected every syllable. He listened.

"When you look into my eyes, I see nothing but her in yours."

It always goes back to Grace.

The lack of pain in your voice irked him on a deep, almost irrational level.

"At first I was hurt--confused. But now"--you circled back to him--"now, I feel nothing. I am nothing." You waited for him to interject despite knowing he never would. Sometimes, you were too painfully clear of his character; of just how much control he had over you; of how many ways he could hurt you while protecting you--love you while losing you.

"Then I realized: I'd rather be yours than nothing. Isn't it sad--a lass like me? Maybe I should first learn how it feels to be my own--to know every crease of my skin and grow comfortable in my flesh how you've grown so comfortable in mine."

The man you loved, whom you had sacrificed for one final time.

Your muscles yearned to reunite with him, but you held your arms to your sides in protest. "Thomas Shelby, you love me how a man should, but not how a woman should feel loved."

And now you'll spend the rest of your life chasing a notion--a concept--made only somewhat tangible by a man who could give you no more than all of him. Now you'll lose yourself searching for someone to search for you. Now you'll see him in all the men who fail in forgivable ways and love kindly.

A piece of him you will keep; a piece of you he will throw away. Until the next.

"You love me," he states, seemingly unphased. "And I love you."

"You don't know what love is, Thomas. How could you, when you've never loved anyone more than they've loved you?

"That's the ultimate testament of the caliber of a man's heart. It was never me, Thomas. It's her name you whisper in your sleep. Hear it. Accept it. Remember my voice saying it. Cling to it for the rest of your goddamn life so you never tell another woman you love her again."

For the first time, he noticed, you sounded defeated.

For the first time, he saw the vices of Birmingham shade your rural clarity.

Your voice sounded different without the usual fight in it; it revealed the exhaustion you forced down with cigarettes every morning and night. Suddenly the violet shadows under your eyes introduced themselves. Suddenly you looked 5 kilograms emaciated.

It was then that you became another woman in Thomas Shelby's life. You were no longer of the Kilkee coast or the sweetened countryside. You were ruined, and now you were just like the rest.

No girl who ever got tangled up in Shelby business ever makes it to London.

A swell.

A silence.

An empty impenitence.

"Goodbye, Thomas."

While he waited for you to fight for him, you once more decided to give.

Twice more, he took from you.

You wanted to feel his warmth against your lips once more. You had suddenly wished you'd savored your last kiss. "I hate what you've made me," you whispered.

He hated how the words sounded--how they tainted your tongue.

"You hate what you've become for me," he corrected.

You gave him a lonely, far-off stare, as if you were looking straight through him. He knew he had lost you.

You ignored his previous remark: "I hate how you made me think it was safe to fall in love with you."

You hadn't realized your eyes had welled up with an undeniable glaze until you felt a drop of glass wetness fall from your cheek. "I hate how you've turned me into another one of your women."

When Thomas didn't move, or walk closer to you, or even soften at your unraveling, you felt sour all over. Suddenly, you wanted it to hurt.

"No one has ever loved me in my entire life," you said to yourself, almost inaudibly. It sounded so ridiculously girlish and naive, unlike anything he had ever heard you say before.

A swell.

A painful one in the grit of your heart.

You felt heavy as you slowly turned and left his office.

†

He found you passed out in the chapel, your chest sprawled across the altar, your palms still clasped together in weak prayer. A mistiness clung to your eyelashes. He was once again reminded how much he loved how you looked in your sleep: like a soft lull of the shore had washed over you and cured a light peace into your soul.

He stood over you, counting your breaths and watching your lungs expand with life just to expel it. You smelled of ash and rosaries and beeswax. A tear rolled over the apples of your cheek and onto the peak of your nose.

"Silly girl," he rasped lowly before sitting on the floor and pulling your limp form into the cradle of his chest. His palm met the crown of your head to pull you further into his weight, his other hand hooking around the lonely bend of your waist. He felt his shirt seep with moisture, and he knew you were awake.

"She was a piece of my past I can't go back to take away," he said, his chin resting atop your head, voice bitter yet smooth like coffee on a good day, "But if any part of her had led me to you, I wouldn't go back to change a moment of it even if I could."

Your shoulders shuddered silently, and your sobs permeated directly through his chest and into his heart. He always knew just what to say, to the point it scared you.

"Give it time," said Thomas, petting your head in rhythm with your heart, "Give it time."

While you gave, he invested. He invested in all the times you've chipped away at yourself for him, and he kept them in his heart until the next time he would use them--like a business transaction.

But could you blame him for loving you how he knows best?

To understand his love was more than enough. Yet, your consistent upturned and empty palms rendered you greedy.

He collects your wet cheeks between his hands and brings you to look up at him. In his eyes, you saw the end of a road.

Was this all there was? Maybe so.

"Let's get married. Right here, right now"--he swiped his thumb across the slick of your undereye--"That way you'll be mine to keep. No more goodbyes."

You felt the Lord's eyes on your kneeling form. An odd feeling of shame and acceptance washed over you and clogged your chest.

It was then that you knew: loving Thomas Shelby was never going to be beautiful. It wasn't simple or painless or any of the things love should be. And it would never be the same kind of love that it was yesterday.

But what could you do? What could you do if you loved him nonetheless?

If you would always be loved how broken women are loved?

x.

[brekk3red]

On Lizzie and Tommy Shelby

☆ A Yapping Session ☆

Notes: I've recently finished the last episode of Peaky Blinders and I have so much on my mind regarding the relationship between Lizzie and Thomas. There simply isn't enough content online to accommodate for my internet surfing, so I'll post my thoughts on here instead, mainly about why I don't think the ship would ever work out. Spoilers and (probably) many grammatical errors after the cut!

It isn't that I don't want to like Lizzie x Tommy - in fact, I was on my knees the entire show praying that they would work out. Eventually, though, I lose hope seeing their relationship struggle to move beyond a painful, one-sided love for the majority of the entire show (except towards the end, but more on that later). It gets to a point where they need a miracle to work.

I should also mention Grace. To me, her significance in the show seems greater when she's dead than alive. I didn't even think that she would make an appearance again after season 1, and that her role is to solidify the distrust Thomas has in others (caused by their entanglements followed by her betrayal). I don't dislike her at all, but I don't think I ever got the chance to truly invest myself in her story before she is already killed. What the show stresses most is the impact her death leaves on Thomas. He is tortured by grief, self-blame, guilt, etc.. So while I don't care much for Grace x Tommy, it's not difficult to see that Thomas will never love anyone as much as he loves Grace.

As for Lizzie, she is who Thomas turns to after Grace's death. They haven't had much of a romantic history beforehand, but a sexual one turned professional when he offers her a job as his secretary (I will try to avoid recounting everything in the show lest this gets boring). During this time, Lizzie acts as his emotional crutch. This doesn't mean much, just that he uses her body to distract himself from the grieving of his late wife. Although he is the one to promise her complete exemption from her past job as a prostitute, he breaks that promise once at the Derby race, then again by basically treating her like one to cope with the loss of his wife. The only difference now is that she is exclusive to Thomas, almost willingly so because she harbours feelings for him.

Their sexual relationship continues throughout the seasons, and he turns to her once more when memories of Greta (pre-war Thomas' lover) resurfaces. So really, up to this point, there isn't a time when he has sex with Lizzie, with Lizzie in mind.

Lizzie's pregnancy prompts their marriage due to the stigmas surrounding children born of wedlock at the time, so it obviously isn't out of love. Nothing particular changes afterwards and Lizzie remains a long shot from ever comparing to Grace. I probably will go back to this topic a lot, but the difference between Thomas’ interactions with Grace contrary to other women is huge. Their sex scenes (often in slow-motion with backing music, etc.) is exceptionally intimate in contrast to the furniture-thumping, lustful fucking he has with prostitutes. Lizzie unfortunately falls into the latter category. Where even well into their marriage, she has to personally demand they do it on the bed.

That whole episode really stands out to me regarding their relationship. Thomas has no qualms in bedding other women while married to her, and Lizzie knows this. Yet she only goes as far as to forbid him from doing it in their own home and not within a day of holding their daughter’s hand (I think). It’s pitiful and only gets worse when Thomas drops the statement that she is “his property” and no one else may touch her. That sounds like something younger me would read on Wattpad and giggle and kick my feet (shame on me), but there is nothing commendable or romantic about this. While Lizzie has to negotiate against his cheating, he brazenly chalks her up as an asset in his inventory, like he would a car or a horse. Possessiveness also isn't love (‼️). There is a clear power imbalance in their dynamics; Lizzie is never in control, Thomas is. He almost never listens to anyone, let alone her. It is always him who makes the decisions and she could argue all she wants but inevitably, she would have to be the one to submit.

More specifically about Thomas' infidelity, I would understand if he has sex with other women for the sake of furthering his plans, such as with Jessie. After all, he isn't in love with Lizzie or their political marriage, so it wouldn't burden him to cheat on her if it means that he gets what he wants logically. However, he doesn't just do that. He hires prostitutes and speaks to Lizzie within the span of seconds and doesn't bat an eye. At some point even basic respect is lacking in their relationship, a relationship that Lizzie has been so loyal to, yet she is constantly met with nothing but humiliation. She holds the title of being his wife, but what supports it other than some rings and legal documents?

Heading towards the last few episodes, Thomas strives to change his ways due to false news about his impending death. He becomes more considerate of Lizzie, shows his care more often and more openly, but their relationship couldn't be salvaged with the given time constraints. At some point, Thomas says "I love you" for what is probably the first time. The way I see it, though, is that he is pushing himself to love her because he knows that is what she wants, what will make her happy. It couldn't, and doesn't work, especially given the short time they have. Even if what he says is true, Lizzie ends up leaving him.

I like this ending. Thomas is right when he says that she deserves better. My gorgeous, breath-taking, soul-stealing queen does deserve better than him and it's about time they let go of whatever relationship they have. While Thomas cares for Lizzie immensely, their relationship is more toxic than not and he ultimately couldn't give her what she needs and deserves after all these years. Sometimes things don't work out and that's okay. I hope that they do not return to each other in the movie (if it comes out), but find separate, better lives for themselves.

Notes: that is all of my late night rant, i may just be spewing nonsense atp so do tell me if i've gotten anything wrong or if you have different takes on these topics. thank yew (❁´◡`❁)

[heeahheeya]

I found Lizzie hiding behind the whole people in the Tommy x Grace wedding photo. People of Tommy's side smile, or seem to be happy. Only Lizzie has dark face without smile.

[ace-the-fox]

I want to be a Tommy Shelby girly so much but why's he actually being such a fat cheating slag, I don't know if I can do this—

[normalbrothers]

Tommy Shelby & Linda Shelby + through the seasons

[angelofthenight]

Alfie: You jumped out of a window for me

Tommy: You pushed me

Alfie: I shoved you

[aphroditeslover11]

A Night At The Opera

More requests are on their way, I seem to have come down with something again so everything is just taking a while.

Anyway, some preferences inspired by my trip yesterday of what it would be like to go to the opera with a few of our boys. It’s fun alone, but I dare say it would be more entertaining with one of them!

Moodboard below is sourced from Pinterest photos.

Robert Fischer:

I feel like if he was going to an opera it would usually be for something to do with business, he would probably be more interested in networking than the music. After a while of you being together he would ask you along to one of these events, probably to the MET opera in New York.

He would be surprised when you were actually excited about going, waving the libretto in front of him and trying to tell him everything that you had found out about the composer before you went.

He would make sure that you were treated like a princess all evening, being driven to the theatre with him in the back of a private limousine and being pandered to all evening with champagne in the private box that was booked for his party. He would go so far as banning any business talk during the performance so that you could watch undisturbed.

He loved to watch how your face lit up as the singers dived from aria to aria, even crying in parts. He was aware of what was going on on stage, but spent most of the evening watching you. At the end you would fly to your feet in a standing ovation, realising moments later that you were the only one in the box doing so, he would quickly stand up, joining you to stop you from feeling conspicuous. Of course, after the successful business man was up, the rest of the box followed in suit.

He would become a patron of the MET opera after this, telling you as a surprise on your birthday. He’d go to events with you as often as he could.

Tommy Shelby:

He would only ever go to an opera if it was absolutely necessary, most likely something to do with his new intelligence activities.

He’d be the most unenthusiastic audience member ever, probably saying that opera was a pile of rubbish. Even if he did happen to actually enjoy it he wouldn’t admit it, worried that it would impact his image.

If you asked him to go back with you he’d playfully tease you and tell you to take Alfie instead. He was more than a bit irritated when one day he received a phonecall saying that you had called his bluff, actually spending the evening at the Royal Opera House with Solomons!

Lenny Miller:

He’d take you to the opera at the Palais Garnier in Paris for his birthday. He was a relatively cultured person and had been a few times before, unlike you who were completely unfamiliar.

The idea came from when you had forced him to watch Pretty Woman one evening and had asked him what the opera was actually like. Hence, he had decided that for your first opera visit he was going to take you to see La Traviata.

He gave you the full treatment beforehand, even though it was his celebration. He made sure that you went shopping for a new dress and whatever else you might need. You used the opportunity whilst he was at work to buy his present as well, a new watch that he wore on the evening of the performance.

The evening was amazing, going out for dinner before heading to the theatre. You were in a private box, about two tiers up with an amazing view. Lenny managed to book it through a contact he had from the agency.

He was nervous that you wouldn’t share his enjoyment of the performance, but he could see it in your eyes how moved you were by the music. You were on top of the world when your drinks arrived at the interval, snuggling into his side for the second act. Pretty Woman had been right, there certainly was something romantic about the opera.

Oppie (pre Los-Alamos):

Every year his friends went on a trip to opera and every year they managed to bully him into going. It was no secret how much he despised it, always finding it too much for him and walking out after the first act.

This year he was finally planning on saying no, only then to find out that you (who he had developed a secret soft-spot for recently) were going along as well. He melted to butter when you asked him if he would go along and immediately agreed.

On the car journey there he would be in a foul mood, constantly reminding himself that it would be worth it though. He tried to focus on how you were pushed against him each time there was a bump in the road as a reminder of your presence.

As the orchestra played the first note he was filled with dread, knowing what he had just sentenced himself to. It turned out to be worth it though, as when things began to get uglier it was his hand that you reached for. He was sure that he was in.

This was the first time he managed to stay put for the entire performance.

[borgialucrezia]

peaky blinders — 2x06 created by steven knight