A woman in a headstand pose outdoors shows a dark sleeve tattoo on her upper arm and forearm, with foliage and sea behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark sleeve tattoo on arm during a headstand

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman balances upside down in a headstand on a pale concrete ledge, wearing an olive bikini, with her head and face mostly hidden. A dense dark tattoo covers much of her visible upper arm and forearm, and lighter linework appears near her wrist. Green foliage, a palm frond and the sea fill the background under a soft, hazy sky.

Upper arm Forearm Woman Bikini Foliage Palm Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the wet sand. The tide is coming, but it has never yet finished a story, and this one is old enough to have been told on the sea wall of Orrivane, the kingdom that ran out of land before it ran out of pride. Its queen had a daughter named Marisol who would not walk like other children. She went along the top of the sea wall on her hands, legs lifted high against the sky, and the gulls took to calling her the Upside Princess.

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The queen's ink-maker, a grim old man called Tobiah Crane, had marked every soul at court with dark designs of mangrove and fern, so the sea would know its own. He said the sea was a sulking lover that needed reminding. Marisol mocked him, and one evening she dared the tide itself: if it could drown a girl standing on her head, let it try. She balanced on the ledge, bare soles to the dusk, and the water rose slowly to meet her.

What the sea did was turn the world over. For a whole night the fishing boats hung from the clouds by their anchor ropes, and the palms grew down out of the sky with their roots in the air. In the morning Marisol came back dripping, her forearms black to the wrist with ink that had not been there before, and fine silver threads wound round each wrist like a bracelet of gull feathers. Tobiah Crane sat down on the wall and laughed until he wept.

So the court learned its lesson, though I will not spell it out for you, because the tide dislikes a moral more than it dislikes a dare. Remember only this: when the sea gives back what it has taken, it gives it the wrong way up. Now, who wants the next one, and who will hold the lantern?