Black and grey botanical tattoo of a figure in a polka dot dress with a bouquet of dahlia-like flowers for a head, on the upper arm.

Flower-headed dancer on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A figure in a short, dotted dress stands with arms outstretched and ballet-style laced shoes, its head replaced by a bouquet of layered flowers with leaves and buds. The design uses fine, clean outlines with stippled dotwork shading on the dress and petals. It is rendered in black and grey ink and sits vertically along the upper arm against a plain, light background.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Woman Flower Bouquet Dahlia Leaves Dress Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ketty had been told by the old women that a girl who danced through the seventh night of the barley feast would be granted one wish, so she laced her borrowed shoes tight with blue thread and went out onto the threshing floor while the lamps were still being lit. Her mother watched from the doorway with her arms folded. She had never trusted wishes, having buried two husbands and a son.

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By the third hour the drummers were grey with tiredness, and Ketty's dress, dotted all over with the little white beads she had sewn on by moonlight, clung to her back. She did not stop. She turned with her arms out as though the air were a partner who might leave her, and with every turn she thought of the thing she wanted most, which was for the wheat to come in early and the hill road to stay open through the winter.

On the seventh night, as the sky went pale over the cistern, something pressed down on the top of her head like a warm palm. She stopped, and the drums stopped with her. Her mother came forward, looked once and said nothing. Ketty could no longer feel her own face, only the heavy weight of late flowers pushing up into the dark, and when she tried to call out, a bud opened on her tongue instead.

The valley said afterwards that the road stayed open all that winter, and that the flowers came back every autumn on the spot where she had stood. Her mother planted them along the wall and tied a strip of blue thread around the tallest stem each year, so that whoever came up the hill would know which dancer had paid for the road.