Colour tattoo of an Art Nouveau style woman with red hair and white flowers, with teal and white swirls, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art Nouveau woman upper arm sleeve

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a red top shows a large tattoo of a woman with flowing red hair and a white flower crown, set against a teal background. The design has bold outlines, smooth shading and white scrolling ribbons and flowers that wrap around the upper arm and shoulder. Red, teal and white ink dominate, and the composition follows the curve of the arm.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Woman Portrait Flower Hair Swirl Ribbon

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the sawdust, it gets into everything. You want the tale of the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Marvels, the one that went bust in Shrewsbury the summer the big top burned? Then I'll tell you about the poster woman first, because the poster woman outlived the show.

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Her name was Ottilie, though the bills only ever called her The Autumn Queen. A Frenchman painted her in a single afternoon in a Bristol hotel room, all curling ribbon and copper hair, a crown of white blossom pinned above a brow nobody had ever seen on a real face. Teal behind her like a river at evening. The brothers pasted her on every hoarding from Bath to Carlisle, and folk walked in out of the rain just to see if the girl in the picture was real. She was not. Ottilie was a wire-walker from Leeds with a cough and a sour temper, and she hated that painted face with a passion.

By the autumn of the fire the money had gone as thin as the ribbons on those posters. The lions were sold, the elephant had died in a field near Wem, and the brothers argued over the last of the canvas. Ottilie walked the high wire one final night with the old bills peeling off the fence behind her. She did not fall. A boy in the crowd said afterwards she looked like she was painting the sky with her feet.

When the tent went up in flames, the only thing saved was a rolled-up poster tucked under her arm. Years later a sign painter in Shrewsbury found it in a skip, flattened it on his bench and sighed at the colours. Some faces, I tell you, outlast the people who wore them. Now mind the lamp on your way out.