Woman seen from behind with a raised arm showing a black tribal band and a coloured floral sleeve on the upper arm, and a black spider tattoo on the forearm of her lowered arm.

Floral sleeve and spider on upper arm and forearm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind in a sleeveless tan top and teal shorts, one arm raised over her head. Her raised arm carries a solid black band with geometric points and a coloured sleeve of flowers and a painted figure, with soft shading. Her other forearm shows a black linework spider, set against a grey camouflage-patterned background.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Forearm Spider Flower Sleeve Figure Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies in Mrs Pargeter's glasshouse had gone past their best by the first week of September, and Ada, the spider who had lived in the rafters since the spring, decided the autumn was hers to spin. She worked the gaps between the cracked panes, strung her lines from the cane frames to the drying rack, and kept an eye on the poster tacked beside the potting bench. It showed a woman with a crown of poppies, her hair lifting in a slow curl, one hand holding a sprig of something pale as if it might be taken from her.

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Ada had never seen a face so patient. Every morning she spun a little more silk toward the poster, a thread at a time, and every evening the woman looked exactly as she had before, which Ada took to mean she was listening. On the third night the door banged open and the wind carried the smell of rain and diesel up from the lane. The poster lifted off its drawing pin and curled in the draught.

'Could you make me a veil?' the woman asked, very quietly, in the voice of paper being turned. 'Something to walk out in. The lane is wet and I have no coat.' Ada had spun more web than anyone in the county, and she knew what a veil was for. She wove until the glasshouse was grey with it, a fine mesh from the potting bench to the broken door, and when the woman stepped through, her poppies glistened like wet glass.

By morning the poster was blank except for a single curl of hair near the top corner. Mrs Pargeter, sweeping up, found only a gap in the cobwebs and a line of wet footprints going down the lane. Ada, back on her rafter, kept one thread running out to the gate, the way a sailor keeps a rope to the dock. The woman never came back that Ada could see, but the lilies flowered again the next spring, and nothing in the county had ever bloomed so well.