Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile woman with flower crown on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black and grey tattoo shows a woman in profile facing right, her hair swept back and decorated with a band of five-petalled flowers and leaves. The bold outlines and dense black fill are softened by grey shading on the face and hair, and the flower petals are left as light skin tone. The composition fills the forearm against a plain black background, with a patch of another tattoo visible at the top edge and a floral-patterned sleeve at the right.

Traditional Forearm Woman Profile Flower Flower crown Hair Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the coal, the hatch is warm enough, and mind the kettle. You want the true version or the one the lock-keepers tell? Right, then. The true one has her walking the towpath at Hythe Lock every evening of the summer of 1911, hair pinned up so tight her neck ached, carrying a basket of meadowsweet and cow parsley for her mother's sickbed.

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Her mother had a saying about hair that wouldn't lie flat: let it go wild or braid it proper, but never half and half. So Nell braided it proper, swept it back off her face, and wove the flowers through the plait like a crown. Five petals each, white as a gull's belly. The bargemen tipped their caps, and the eel boy at the sluice threw his line into the reeds on purpose.

Then came the August the Isis hauled up empty and a stranger stepped off her with a sack over one shoulder and no cap at all. He asked the way to the chapel. Nell told him the chapel was shut and the way was a long one. He laughed, and she did not like how much she liked that laugh.

He left in September with the barge, and she stayed. It's no sad ending, mind. She took the last crown she'd woven for him, dropped it off the lock gate, and watched it ride the brown water out past the mill towards the sea, five petals at a time, until there was nothing left to see but the light on the weir. Her mother lived two more winters and never once asked where the flowers had gone.