Close photo of a sketchy black line drawing of a ballet dancer with purple, blue and yellow wash on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ballet dancer sketch on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A ballet dancer in mid-movement is drawn with loose, continuous black linework, with one arm raised overhead and the body arched. Soft purple, blue and yellow washes sit behind and within the figure, with lighter streaks of colour suggesting motion. The figure is centred on a close crop of smooth skin against a dark background.

Fine line Upper arm Figure Dancer Brushstroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harrow had the tiller of the Marigold before the lock gates had finished groaning shut behind them, and her father was already snoring on the cabin bench with his boots still laced. The fiddler sat on a bollard above the lock, playing to nobody in particular, and the water in the chamber had gone the colour of weak tea going cold at the edges.

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The old bargewomen on the Lark Cut had a tale about the far lock, where the mist lay thick as wool even in August. They said a dancer lived in it. She had danced herself out of a village wedding forty years back, dancing for a man she had not chosen, and she had never found her way out of the step. Her arm went up toward the sky, they said, as if she were reaching for a rope thrown from a passing boat, and she would keep reaching until someone on the water reached back.

Nell did not believe a word of it, but she tied off the Marigold at the lock landing anyway and climbed onto the gunwale when the fiddle changed tune. The light was going purple over the hedges, a blue streak lay on the water, and the lamp in the lock-keeper's window threw yellow across everything. She lifted one arm, then the other, and turned on the narrow wood with her skirts pulling round her ankles.

The mist parted slowly, the way a curtain goes back. Inside it, faint as a pencil line, a woman stood with her body arched and one arm raised high, and where her skirts should have been there were only washes of colour bleeding into the air. Nell lost her footing and laughed, and the figure in the mist seemed to lean into the laugh and stay there, held.

Her father woke when the fiddle stopped. He came up the cabin steps, looked at her standing on the gunwale with her arm in the air, and did not say anything. He only took up the rope, and when the mist was gone he was holding one end of it out over the water, waiting.