Black and grey tattoo of a woman with an updo, long gloves and a cigarette holder, on the outer upper arm, in a realistic portrait style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey portrait of a woman on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink portrait of a woman with her hair in an updo, wearing a dark high-necked dress with a pearl necklace and long gloves, holding a slender holder to her lips. The figure is rendered in bold solid black shapes with smooth grey highlights on the face and arm, giving a high-contrast, silhouette-like finish. The design sits on the upper arm and fills the frame with the figure angled toward the right, with plain skin and a grey patterned shirt around it.

Realism Upper arm Woman Portrait Updo Glove Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold that lantern steady, Tommy, and don't look at the sea while I talk, it only listens harder. Mrs Vera Lindqvist came aboard at Southampton with two trunks, a pair of long cream gloves for every evening, and a silver cigarette holder she never once lit. She'd tap it against her bottom lip at the rail, and the stewards learned that meant she was counting something she'd rather not finish.

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The purser gave her the table nearest the brass lamp in the first-class saloon. Each night she dictated letters to a man in Halifax, sentences so careful they might have been stitched, and each night she wouldn't sign them. By the third week the purser had a drawer full of unsigned pages and a rule that nobody else sat there.

Then came the gale off the Grand Banks. The ship stood on its nose, the cabin doors banged like gunshot, and in the middle of it her pearls snapped loose. Forty-one of them rolled the length of the corridor. I went down on my knees and filled my cap, and when I brought them back she only laughed and told me to keep one for my trouble. I'm an old man, Tommy, and I still have it in my waistcoat.

We docked at Halifax at dawn. She was gone before the gangway went down, but on the rail lay her holder with a folded page tucked into its end: Leave the lamp burning, the sea is only a sea. No name. Every crossing since, I've left that lamp lit in the saloon, and every crossing, somewhere off the Banks, I catch myself looking for a grey gown at the rail.