Colourful neo-traditional chest and shoulder tattoo showing a woman's face, an iris, scrollwork, a butterfly and roses, shown in three photo panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral chest and shoulder tattoo with a woman's face

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A large chest tattoo centres on a woman's face framed by swirling acanthus-style scrollwork and a purple iris, with a butterfly at the upper right. Roses and a further butterfly extend over the shoulders in the lower panels, and fine dotted chains hang beneath the design. Bold outlines and warm oranges, reds and purples dominate, with cooler blue-grey roses on the left shoulder, and the three panels show the tattoo from different angles.

Neo-trad Botanical Chest Shoulder Woman Face Iris Rose Butterfly Scrollwork Flower Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quayle had been pulling proofs since five, and by noon the lithography stone in the back room of Pritchard & Son smelled of turpentine and wet paper. Her father wanted the poster for the Regent Pier concert hall finished by Friday. The commission was a woman's face rising out of a scroll of acanthus leaves, the way the French posters were doing it that year, and the customer had sent back three drafts with the same note: more gold, less sad.

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Mabel did not think the woman looked sad. She thought she looked like someone listening to the sea from inside a shell. She had sketched her from the window of the pier office, where the tide chalked its line on the harbour wall, and she gave her a purple iris at the throat and hung strings of pearls beneath her like dew on a spider's web. Two painted butterflies, one copper and one the colour of a bruise, drifted in from the margins to settle at the edges. Her father called them frivolous. The customer's wife, who came down to see the stone, called them perfect.

On Thursday night the stone cracked straight through the iris, a fine line running across the purple petals. Her father swore and reached for the pumice. Mabel stopped him. The crack had split the colour exactly where the ink had pooled, and in the lamplight the two halves looked like a pair of wings opening. She inked a blue-grey rose over the break, the only cool note in all that heat, and printed the sheet before anyone could argue.

The poster went up on Friday in a hundred shop windows. Mabel kept the first proof, the one with the crack still in it, and pinned it above the bench where she could see it while she worked. Nobody on the pier ever asked why the face looked so calm. She never told them the rose was for the sailor who had left without saying goodbye, or that she had lied to her father about the crack.