Colour chest tattoo in an art nouveau style showing a woman's face, two moths, an iris and scrolling leaves, with rose tattoos on the shoulders, shown in a three-panel collage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art nouveau chest piece with moths and iris

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A large chest tattoo shows a woman's face framed by swirling hair, two moths, a purple iris and orange and red scrolling foliage. Strings of fine beaded chains hang beneath the central design, with dark shaded rose tattoos on the shoulders. The lines are bold and the shading is soft, with rich purples, oranges and reds set against grey shading, and the three photographs show the design from the front and at an angle.

Neo-trad Botanical Chest Shoulder Woman Face Moth Dragonfly Iris Rose Leaves Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stones had been stacked against the back wall of Harrow and Lusk since March, grey slabs that smelled of turpentine and wet chalk, and nobody had touched the one with the iris on it since Aldous left for Brussels. I found it on a Thursday when the gas was low and rain was coming sideways past the skylight. Someone had drawn a woman's face into the stone in greasy crayon, her hair lifting up and round like smoke off a struck match, and beneath her a flower pressed so hard the paper had torn through.

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Mr Vosper wanted the Ardent Cabaret bills on Kentish Town Road pulled by dawn. "Moths on the left, the chains on the right," he said, not looking up from his ledger. "And for God's sake keep the purple off the hair." I inked the stone with the soft rag the way Aldous taught me, and the first proofs came off clean: orange scrolls curling like burnt paper, the beads of the hanging chains sharp as pinpricks, two moths with their wings open as if to catch the gaslight.

By four o'clock I had pulled two hundred sheets and the stone had started to misbehave. Every proof showed the iris a shade darker than the last, until the petals looked bruised, and a third moth I had never drawn sat half-hidden in the foliage. I stopped the press and held the last sheet to the lamp. The moth's wing was pale and faintly dusted, the way the real ones are, and I did not remember putting it there.

I sold the bills to the cabaret for a shilling a dozen and kept the final sheet folded inside my coat. Walking home past the lamp posts, I heard something tapping against the glass, soft and patient, like it wanted in.