Black ink linework tattoo of an embracing couple in the style of Klimt's The Kiss, surrounded by flowers and stars, on the upper arm.

Klimt-style The Kiss tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts two figures embracing, drawn in outline with patterned robes of circles and rectangles, based on Klimt's The Kiss. Small flowers, stars and hearts fill the space above, and stems and ferns trail below the figures. The design is done in black ink with solid black areas for the hair and fine, even linework throughout, with no colour.

Fine line Upper arm Couple Embrace Flower Star Heart Fern Spiral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the gallery flooded, Mrs Okonedo-Pryce made me carry the Klimt up four flights to the attic while the Thames came over the pavement like a slow tide of oil. I was twenty-two and had been hired to dust frames. She told me the painting was a lie, that the two lovers were never kissing at all, only standing so close on that golden hillside that the gold swallowed them both. I didn't understand her until I saw the copy that hung in the stairwell, a print so faded the robes had gone the colour of weak tea.

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We laid the canvas flat on sacking under the skylight and she traced the squares with a fingernail. Circles, rectangles, circles again, the same patient pattern repeated until it stopped being cloth and became weather. Above the lovers someone had scattered little flowers and stars, and she said the painter had meant them as a sky the lovers could not see. Below, the meadow ran into ferns and small white blooms, the ground they stood on dissolving into stems. I asked why the man's face was hidden and she laughed, a dry sound like paper folding, and said that was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for a pair of lovers, to leave them unfinished.

The water stopped at the third step. In the morning the gallery smelled of wet plaster and the cracked gilt leaf lay in drifts on the floor, catching light like spilt coins. Mrs Okonedo-Pryce sat on an upturned crate with her coat around her knees and watched me sweep. The painting was undamaged. I have thought about that often, how the flood had taken everything but the lovers, who had gone on holding each other in the dark of the attic, bent over a patch of gold that nobody could reach.