Woman in a black racerback top showing colourful traditional-style tattoos on her upper arm and forearm, including a bear and a rose.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful tattoos on a woman's arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a black racerback tank top, cropped below the neck and with her face not shown, displays colourful tattoos on her outer left arm. The upper arm has a bear-like figure with a red rose beneath it, and the forearm has a further coloured design in red, green and blue. The bold outlines and flat colour fills suggest a traditional style, with the image lit evenly against a plain background.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Bear Rose Arm tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard behind Hollin Farm is stripped by the last week of August, all but one old Bramley leaning over the lane wall, its fruit held high where the pickers' ladders can't reach. You have been told to leave it alone. Your mother told you, and the farmer's dog told you more loudly, and you have spent the whole summer being good in the way bears are good, which mostly means sitting still and being looked at.

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The rose grows at the foot of the wall, red as a stop sign, planted by a woman who came to the valley to paint and left after one winter. She told the children it would keep the wasps off the windfalls. You do not believe in wasps. You believe in the smell of apples going soft in the grass, sweet and a little drunk, and when the lane empties at dusk you climb the wall with the care of something much heavier than you are.

Halfway up the trunk the branch gives. You drop into the nettles with a Bramley in each paw and a bruise blooming on your hip, and you lie there laughing at the sky until a torch clicks on over the wall. The farmer's face is pink with sleep. He looks at you, then at the apples, then at the rose trampled flat beneath you.

"Well," he says at last. "I suppose that tree was always going to be yours." He passes you the ladder, and you climb it with rather less grace than you intended, and for once nobody asks you to be good.