Realism tattoo on an upper arm of a grey portrait of a woman in a crown and veil, with pink watercolour splashes and the words WE ARE NOT AMUSED above.

Crowned portrait with pink scrollwork on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A greyscale portrait of a woman wearing a jewelled crown, veil and pearl necklace fills the centre of the design, shown in soft shaded realism. Loose pink watercolour washes sit behind the head, and a pink scrolled frame curls around the lower half of the portrait. Black lettering in a serif capital style runs across the top of the design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pink paint arrives in a tin marked "Flamingo, Do Not Use Indoors", and you use it anyway, because Mrs Okafor on the ninth floor has promised the residents' association will pay for the stairwell if the wall is finished by Friday. Nobody has asked the council. Nobody ever does in Brackwell House, which is why the lift has worked for eleven days straight and nobody quite believes it.

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You start with the crown. Mrs Okafor brings a photocopy of an old stamp, blown up at the library, and you spend a whole evening with a pencil and a bad lamp, getting the veil to fall the right way over the shoulders. The pink goes on wet, in soft clouds behind the head, and dries lighter than you hoped, which is the first lesson of the job: the wall decides. By the third night the scroll frame is curling round the bottom of the face as if it grew there, and the lettering across the top still needs doing.

Then a letter comes from the housing office, typed, saying the mural breaches the tenancy agreement and must be removed within fourteen days. You pin it to the lift door and read it aloud to the empty landing, slowly, in the voice you have been saving for the right occasion. Above the portrait, in black capitals as careful as the crown, you letter the line Mrs Okafor picked from her old book: WE ARE NOT AMUSED. Then, smaller, underneath, in your own hand: Signed, the ninth floor.

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