Black linework stencil of an Art Nouveau woman with flowing hair, a medallion and scrollwork, drawn on a thigh.

Art Nouveau woman and medallion stencil on thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Flash

A woman in profile wears a headband and beaded necklace, with long wavy hair falling past a round ornate medallion. Scrolling foliage and swirls frame the figure and fill the top and bottom of the design. The design is drawn in fine black outline with no shading or colour, shown as a stencil or line guide on pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The proofs came off the press still tacky, and Mr Ansell wanted the woman's hair fixed before the gas was lit on Cheapside. I sat up with the stone and a stick of greasy ink, tracing the scrolls that climbed from the bottom corner like smoke with nowhere to go. The medallion was the hard part. Ada had sat for the figure in March, a silver disc on a ribbon at her throat, and she swore the pattern in it was a sun from a shop in Venice that had burned down before she was born. I drew it from memory and from the proof, one bead at a time.

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Around two in the morning the shop went quiet in the particular way a press room does, the rollers ticking as they cooled. I looked up and the figure had moved. Not much. Her eyes were still lowered, her profile still turned to the left, but the long hair that I had carried down past the medallion now ran under the border and into the foliage, as if the scrolls had been waiting for it. I blinked and it was only ink on paper, the way it should be.

In the morning there were four hundred clean sheets stacked on the bench. Ada came in for her wage and stood over them with her gloves in one hand. She tapped the lowest sheet, where the medallion had printed a shade darker than the rest. Somebody had pressed a fingerprint into the centre of the sun, small and neat, the way you might leave a mark on a window to be sure it was real glass.

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