Art Nouveau woman with ivy and peonies on a thigh

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman in side profile with her hair and head wreathed in ivy leaves and blooms, set within a curved Art Nouveau frame of swirling lines and peonies. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled dotwork used for shading across the petals, background and frame. The image is entirely black and grey and includes a second close-up panel showing the peony and dotwork detail.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Woman Profile Peony Flower Swirl Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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We are four days out from Liverpool and the stone is still wrapped in oilcloth in the hold, because Mr Aske will not let anyone else touch it. You asked whether the lithograph came out as he promised. It did, though not quite as he drew it. Three weeks I spent on the stippling alone, a dot for every petal and every shadow under the peonies, until my wrist would not close around a teacup. He says the dots are what will catch the light in the exhibition hall in Valparaíso. I think they are what will catch the damp.

Something happened the night the sea got up off the Bar. The crate shifted and a sheet from the proof run came loose, and I found it at dawn pinned against the cabin wall by a wet towel. The woman in it had turned her face. In the proof she looks along the curve of the frame, the way a swallow looks at the mast, but on that sheet her profile had slid a fraction towards the stern, towards the coast we have left. I could not tell if the damp had done it or my own hand, months ago, in the dark of the workshop.

I have not told Mr Aske. I pressed the sheet flat under the Bible in my bunk and I have looked at her every evening since. She is not sad. She is only listening for something that is still behind us.

Yours in haste, Tom