Black and grey Art Nouveau style tattoo of a seated woman with flowing hair and drapery, surrounded by stems and blossoms, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art Nouveau woman and flowers on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a seated woman with her hair swept up, one hand raised near her face, and a long flowing gown that wraps around her body. Clusters of stylised flowers and stems fill the lower part of the design and climb up beside her. The fine black outlines are filled with light grey shading, and the composition wraps around the upper arm.

Botanical Upper arm Woman Flower Stem Hair Drapery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lithograph stones were heavier than they looked, and Nell Harrow had been warned about them by every man on the wharf at Limehouse. She rowed them up on the Mary Anne every second Tuesday, wrapped in sacking and lashed to the thwarts, and the barge stank of turpentine and river mud all the way to Camden. Her father had sold the cargo to a printer in Clerkenwell who wanted a woman in a flowing gown for a tonic advertisement, and who had not, he said, wanted to pay for a real model.

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Nell made the drawing herself at the galley table, with the hatch open to the cold. She sat the sitter in the chair by the stove, a seamstress from Wapping whose hair would never stay pinned, and asked her to lean back as if listening to someone she didn't much like. The seamstress laughed and the lines went wrong. Then the girl's little brother came down the ladder with a broken clay pipe, and the woman lifted one finger to her lips to hush him, and Nell's pencil stopped on the exact gesture she had been chasing for a week.

The printer wanted the flowers larger, the gown wider, and the face smoothed into something nobody could place. He cut the stone himself, paid for the lilies and the stems, and said nothing about the finger. Nell kept the original sheet folded small inside her stays, and when the poster went up on the hoardings along the Euston Road that spring, she walked past it every morning with a loaf under her arm. The gown spilled over the flowers, the hair was swept up, and the woman's hand stayed raised beside her mouth, as though she had only just decided to say nothing at all.