Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman with patterned face markings, a floral headdress and a beaded collar on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Portrait with floral headdress on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's portrait with closed eyes, full lips and patterned markings across her cheeks and brow, topped by clusters of beads and a wreath of flowers. The shading is smooth and grey-toned, with soft gradients across the skin and finer linework in the petals. A thick beaded collar and two dangling pendants fill the length of the forearm.

Realism Forearm Woman Portrait Flower Bead Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Kesh had stopped answering to its name, so the women of the high terraces began keeping their water in beads. Each bead was a day's cup, strung on cord and worn at the throat, and a woman who gave away her collar had given away her thirst. Old Tessamay Vro wore hers to the top of her chin and never once took it off to sleep.

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When the dry year came, the council sent for her. A boy from the lowlands had walked up with a pouch of seed that would not sprout in dust, and he wanted to know who in the terraces could still hear the groundwater running under the stone. Tessamay kept her eyes shut at the meeting. She said the water spoke more quietly when a person looked at it, so she had learned to look at nothing.

She walked the boy down to the cracked cistern with a wreath of dried marigold pinned above her brow, the petals rattling like small coins. She laid her palm flat on the stone and listened. Under the beat of her pulse something moved, slow and patient, like a cow lowing in a far field. She told him to dig where the flowers fell when she dropped them, and they fell towards the crack, so the boy dug, and his spade rang on a pipe older than the terraces.

The water came up brown, then clear. Tessamay unstrung a single bead and pressed it into his palm. 'Pay the cistern back when you can,' she said. He asked what the bead was worth now. She laughed and told him it was worth exactly one more morning, and that the collar at her throat had never been a debt, only a count of the mornings she had been given.