Colour tattoo of a painted figure with closed eyes, red lips and ornate gold and floral patterns on the outer upper arm near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Painted figure tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A rectangular tattoo shows a figure with closed eyes and red lips, surrounded by ornate gold and floral patterning, with a dark speckled band across the top. The shading is smooth and the decorative detail is fine and well defined. The tattoo sits on pale skin on the upper arm, with the shoulder and loose reddish-brown hair visible at the left of the frame.

Upper arm Figure Woman Floral Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold leaf went on the wrong way round twice before Mr Dacre let me touch it, so by the time I laid the third sheet across the woman's shoulder the morning damp had already got into the size and the whole thing wanted to curl like a burnt letter. I breathed on it, the way you do, and it settled.

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The fair had come in off the Ringway road three nights before, its lorries parked in a ragged line behind the rugby pitch. The fortune booth needed a panel for the back of the tent. Dacre gave me one sheet of ply, a pot of ochre, a box of leaf he'd bought off a widow in Stockport, and one instruction: she keeps her eyes shut. Customers can't stand being looked at by something painted, he said. So I gave her heavy lids and a mouth the colour of a fresh cut, and I dark-painted the sky across the top, flecked with chips of silver, because Dacre said stars were the only honest thing in the whole show.

On the last night, a girl from the coconut shy came round the back with a cup of tea and asked who the lady was. I said nobody, just a pattern with a face. She looked at the gold for a long time and said her gran had a cloth like that, folded in a drawer, and nobody had unfolded it since the flood. Then she went off and left the tea on the step.

Dacre pulled the panel down at dawn and the lorries rolled out. The cup was still warm enough to drink, and the gold on the woman's shoulder had caught the first light over the pitch, so for a minute the whole booth glowed like a door left open.