Full-colour tattoo of an Art Nouveau woman in a yellow dress with red flowers in her hair, with swirling vines, across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art Nouveau woman tattoo across upper back

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A large tattoo covers most of the upper back, showing a woman in a flowing yellow dress with red blossoms in her hair, resting her head on her arm. The bold dark outlines, flat colour fills and soft shading follow a decorative Art Nouveau illustration style, with flowing hair and curling vines extending around the figure. Warm yellows, reds and browns dominate the composition, which is framed by bare skin at the edges.

Back Woman Flower Poppy Leaves Vine Dress Hair Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit still, the lot of you, and don't go poking the lad at the end, he's been up since the milk came. Right. You'll have seen the paintings they hang in the Winter Gardens, all those women with their hair blown into vines. This one wasn't a painting. This one was Marguerite Fenn, who came to the Ashgrove Palais the summer the poppies took over the railway embankment, and who danced every Saturday in a yellow dress the colour of cut lemons.

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Nobody asked her to dance, not once that season. She didn't want them to. She'd stand by the long windows with her hair full of red blossom she'd picked off the embankment on her way in, and she'd lean her cheek on her own forearm and watch the floor like it owed her money. The band from Oldham played waltzes until their lips split. Harold Pilling, who ran the bar, swore she had a ticket paid for by somebody in Manchester, and nobody ever proved him wrong.

Then came the last Saturday in August. The windows were thrown open for the heat, and the wind came in off the sea carrying the seeds of every poppy on the coast. Marguerite stood up, pulled a single blossom from her hair and let it fall on the floor. Then she walked out through the far door, and the vines painted on the wall curled after her as if they'd been waiting all along.

Pilling found the yellow dress folded on the bench in the morning. Beside it, pressed flat, was a poppy, still red. That's the one who went home with the sea. Now, who wants the one about the drowned piano?