Pencil drawing of a woman wearing an ornate filigree mask, framed by roses, lilies, leaves and orchids, in a botanical realism style.

Masked woman with roses and orchids

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman's face partly covered by an ornate filigree mask, with her hair flowing into a cluster of roses, calla lilies and leaves. Orchids hang along the lower left, drawn with fine outlines. The face and mask are shaded with soft graphite tones, while the flowers are mostly outlined, and the image is entirely black and grey on a plain pale background.

Botanical Realism Woman Mask Face Rose Orchid Lily Leaves Hair Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The filigree was still warm from the burnisher when Matteo carried it across the Rialto, wrapped in wax paper that smelled of his master's pipe. Nobody commissioned silver masks in February any more, so the order had come from the flower barrow at the foot of the steps, from Irene, who had sold roses there for forty years and wanted something to wear to the carnival ball.

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She turned it over under the lamp of her stall, running a thumb along the scrolls. 'Too much sky in it,' she said, and reached into her apron for a sprig of orchid she had cut that morning from the pots her husband had kept in the glasshouse on Giudecca. Matteo had to fix the wire ribs to take the weight of petals. He worked late, bending the silver to hold a curl of lily, a bloom of rose and the pale hanging spray of orchids, until the mask looked less like something made and more like something grown.

On the night of the ball the lamps along the Grand Canal were doubled in black water, and Matteo went looking for Irene among the costumes. He found her barrow instead, chained to the railing, its buckets empty and a card tucked under a rose: The mask is paid for. Wear it where you like. He stood there a long time, listening to the bells across the water, until a woman in grey silk came down the steps with the mask on her face and a bunch of calla lilies in her hand, and lifted one of them to him like a question.