Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art Nouveau woman with zodiac halo on back

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A woman in profile wears an ornate headpiece and a beaded necklace, set against a turquoise circular halo lined with twelve zodiac symbols. The linework is bold and even, with smooth flat colour in red, teal, green and gold and soft tonal shading on the face and hair. The design fills most of the frame, with flowing red hair and decorative scrollwork extending to the lower corners.

Back Woman Profile Halo Headpiece Flower Scrollwork Necklace Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone had cracked across the grain the night before, a fine white line running through the brow of the woman in the halo, and Monsieur Lacroix wanted it mended by noon or the poster would go to the printers in Lyon with a flaw nobody could see but him. I was seventeen and had been pulling proofs for four months. He handed me the grease pencil and the scraper and told me not to breathe on the stone.

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I worked the crack closed while the light came up grey over the courtyard. Twelve signs ring her head, each in its own small circle, and while I drew over the Ram I noticed the Scales had been cut upside down, the balance beam tilted the wrong way, as if the engraver had copied it from a reflection. Lacroix said the client had asked for it that way, that a lady in Nice wanted her own sign turned to face her. I did not ask which sign was hers. I asked him whether the stone would hold.

It held through two hundred impressions. On the last morning I pulled the first clean sheet myself, and the gold at her throat came up so bright that the pressman crossed himself. I took a pin from my collar and, in the lower scrollwork where the red hair curls into a wave, scratched the small hook of my own sign, no bigger than a grain of rice. Nobody would look there. Lacroix never found it, or never said.

Years later the poster hangs in a dentist's waiting room in Leeds, and I see it whenever I go to have my teeth looked at. She still turns away from me, her eyes on some year she has already read, and the crack I closed is somewhere under the varnish, invisible as ever.