Traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a mascara wand, eyelashes, hearts, a rose in a bottle and script lettering.

Make-up motifs with script on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm covered in traditional style tattoos of make-up items, including a mascara wand, several pairs of eyelashes, small hearts and a green bottle with a red rose. Script lettering runs along the arm beside the designs. Bold black outlines frame flat areas of pink, red, green and teal, with the design spread across the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Eyelashes Heart Rose Bottle Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan kept the spare lashes in a Quality Street tin, pairs of them curled like sleeping spiders, and the week the pantomime lost its dame she sat me down at the dressing table in the church hall and said nobody was going home in the dark. I was fourteen and had never held a wand of mascara in my life. She did not ask whether I wanted to. She just uncapped it and told me to look at the ceiling.

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The green bottle on the shelf had been her mother's, a rose painted on the glass in red enamel that had outlasted whatever tonic was once inside. Nan said it held the good glue, the stuff that would hold a lash through a whole second act and a bit of the interval. Her hands smelled of Pond's and cigarettes she had given up in 1979. Every time she said a word that started with a P she tapped the wand on the rim of the tin, as if it were keeping time.

I went on in a frock that had been let out twice and a wig from the Methodists. The lashes made my eyes look like somebody else's, somebody who could cross a stage without tripping over the hem. In the second row a boy with a sticky Fanta moustache shouted that the dame had spiders on her face, and the whole hall laughed, and I laughed too, because for once it was true.

At the bow Nan stood in the wings with the wand in her fist, watching me the way she watched a sponge cake rise. Then she winked, which she had never done before, and mouthed one word over the clapping: lower.