Colour tattoo of Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss wrapping the forearm, with gold patterned robes, two embracing figures and green and red flowers at the base.

Klimt's The Kiss reproduced on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo reproduces the embracing couple from Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss, with the figures' heads and arms at the upper section and a field of gold rectangles, spirals and circles around them. The linework is clean and the shading is soft, with the ornamental patterns rendered in detail. Golden ochre dominates, joined by greens, reds and blues in the flowers and the lower panel, and the design sits in a rectangular block across the forearm.

Forearm Couple Embrace Flower Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The damp has got into the back bedroom again, so you carry the print down to the kitchen where Mrs Ansell keeps the good scissors. It is a cheap reproduction, bought at a Ramsgate jumble sale for a shilling, two figures folded inside a cloak made of nothing but gold squares. She has pinned it above the range because the kitchen is the only room in Seaview Terrace that never turns cold. You are meant to be sorting laundry lists. Instead you trace the spirals with a fingertip and count the little rectangles the sea light turns the colour of marmalade.

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Lodgers come and go at the house the way the tide does, but the couple in the picture stay put. Mrs Ansell says the man is kissing the woman's cheek and she is trying not to be seen doing it, and that the flowers at their feet are the only honest thing in the painting, being out in the open where anyone can look. You have your own view, which is that the woman's eyes are closed because she is listening to the sea and not to him.

In November a man arrives with a battered suitcase and a tin of gold leaf, asking for a room for a week. He stays five weeks. Every morning he lays a few squares of leaf on a board at the kitchen table, and every evening he scrapes off the ones that split, muttering about the damp. You stop sorting the lists to watch. He never tells you why he has come, and you never ask.

On the last morning the case is gone from the hall and the board sits drying by the window. Mrs Ansell lifts the print down, holds it to the light, and frowns at the bottom corner where the flowers are. There is a new square of gold there now, thick and bright enough to catch the light before the sea does. You pin it back above the range without a word, and the kitchen, for once, is warmer than it was.