Neo-traditional flash design of a woman with a hair bun and a frog on her hand, framed by pink lotus flowers and a banner reading Bayou Beauty.

Bayou Beauty portrait with frog and lotus flowers

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A stylised cartoon woman with a dark hair bun and a jewelled necklace looks over her shoulder, a small green frog perched on her raised hand. Pink lotus flowers, green leaves and hanging moss frame an oval border, with a teal banner lettered Bayou Beauty across the base. Bold outlines, smooth cel-style shading and a saturated palette of teal, pink, green and bronze give it a vintage-inspired finish.

Neo-trad Botanical Woman Frog Lotus Banner Lettering Hair bun Necklace Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the frog on the stairwell of Bramwell House, sitting on the cold concrete between the sixth and seventh floors as if it had paid the service charge. Nobody on the estate keeps a pond. The lift has been broken since August, so you climb with two carrier bags of shopping and hear a small wet croak behind the door of flat fourteen, and you stop with one foot on the step above it.

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Mrs Adeyemi opens the door before you knock. She is seventy-two and has grown water lilies in a washing-up bowl on her balcony since the year the Jubilee bunting went up and never came down. She tells you the frog is her late husband's idea of a joke, that he bought it from a man at Walthamstow market who swore it could talk, and that it has never said a word in nineteen years. Then she presses a ginger biscuit into your hand and asks whether you have ever seen a lotus flower open in a city. You say no. She says you should, and that it takes a bit of nerve.

She wants the frog taken to the half-barrel by the bins, where the council planted something pink in the spring and then forgot it. She says the pond on her balcony is too full of her own stubbornness. So you carry the frog down seven flights in a jam jar with holes punched in the lid, past the graffiti and the brass plate with the lift rules on it, while the rain runs down the railings and the moss hangs off the balcony rails like grey lace.

At the bottom you tip the jar into the barrel. The frog sits on a broad green leaf, gold eyes catching the orange light from the street lamp, and turns its head to look back at you over its shoulder, as if you owe it the fare.