Colour tattoo of a woman with closed eyes and floral patterns in a rectangular panel on the left ribs, in a painterly art nouveau style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Painted woman portrait on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A rectangular panel on the side of the ribs shows a woman with her eyes closed, her hands near her face, and her hair and clothing decorated with dark blue, green, pink and cream floral patterns. The linework is smooth and the shading is soft, giving the piece a painted look. Colour dominates the panel, which sits against plain skin with a hand and a patterned jacket at the edges of the frame.

Ribs Woman Portrait Flower Floral pattern Ornamental Hair Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The panel came to me in a crate packed with wet straw, smelling of the river, its varnish gone the colour of weak tea across the lower third. Mrs Pellow, who had written her cheque twice because the first one bounced, asked only one thing: that I leave the woman's face exactly as her husband had painted it. I told her faces were the easy part. Blue robes and pink scrolls at the hem were what frightened me, because the ground under them had cracked like dry bread.

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I spent three weeks with swabs and a scalpel the width of a fingernail. Under the robe I found a pentimento, a ghost of an earlier arm that had been raised and then lowered, as though the painter had changed his mind about whether she was reaching for something or letting go of it. Pressed behind the stretcher bar was a folded scrap of card in pencil. It said only, Keep her still, she won't sit for me awake.

I understood then why the eyes were closed. He had never painted her looking at him. He had painted her the way he could bear to, asleep and unwatched, and the flowers had grown around her while she slept. I cleaned the varnish from her lashes until they were almost too fine to see. At the end I mixed a little more of the pink for the swirl at the hem, laid it on in one thin glaze, and sat back. Her lids stayed down. I left them that way.