Close crop of a person with lilac hair and a mint lace bustier, showing a traditional-style chest tattoo of a heart, a woman's face and the word SUGAR, with tattooed arms.

Chest and arm tattoos under a mint lace bustier

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

The photo crops the subject at the chin and shows a chest tattoo of a red heart, a woman's face framed by scrollwork and flowers, and the word SUGAR in a bold script. Arm tattoos include a green-skinned figure on the upper arm and a rose on the forearm. The ink is mostly bold outlines with solid fills and some shading, with red, green, blue and pink tones against the pale mint lace.

Traditional Chest Upper arm Forearm Heart Flower Script Rose Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pring had been boiling sugar in the back kitchen of her Margate sweetshop since before the war, and by the August the pier lights came back on she had a window display nobody could walk past. At its centre stood a woman made entirely of pulled sugar, her face framed by curls of spun scroll and a ring of pink sugar roses, and beneath her a red heart the size of a saucer, coloured with cochineal until it glowed like a coal.

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Her nephew Dennis, nine years old and full of opinions, swore the figure winked when the afternoon sun hit the glass. Ada told him sugar does not wink. Still, each morning a rose had vanished from the ring, and the sill was dusted with pink crumbs that tasted faintly of salt and the sea.

One night she sat up with the gas turned low and the shop smelling of burnt caramel, waiting. At half past two the bell over the door stayed silent, but a draught slid under it, and the painted lips in the window moved. The figure said, in a voice like a spoon tapping a cup, that she had been set out to sweeten a wedding that never came off, and she was tired of standing in the glass while the gulls got fat on the leftovers.

Ada unlocked the case. The woman stepped down onto the lino, took a rose from her own hair, pressed it into Dennis's open palm, and walked out towards the pier. The red heart stayed on the sill, softening in the rain until it was only a bright smear on the glass, and in the morning Dennis was still licking his fingers.