Before and after photo of an abdomen where red flowers and black ink splashes cover faded grey script and star outlines.

Red flowers covering an old script tattoo

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

The top panel shows faded grey outline stars and the words Dead Girl Superstar in script across the lower abdomen. The lower panel shows the same area covered with large red flowers, black brushstroke shapes and ink splatters, with the navel visible above. The shading on the petals is soft and the colour is bold against the black ink.

Botanical Other Flower Star Script Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boast had been on the gate since the spring the river rose: four crooked stars and a line of letters a boy had scratched with a nail. Dead Girl Superstar, it read, and the carter's children could spell it out but none of them knew what it meant. Lysa, who kept the dye-house at the bend, could read it well enough. She had looked at it every morning for seven years while she carried her vats past.

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Nobody wanted to scrub it off. The stars had faded to the colour of old ash and the letters ran like sheep tracks, but the gate was the only landmark on the road to the ford. So when the poppies came up that year, thick as spilled wine along the dyke, Lysa cut a armful, crushed the red into a bowl, and went to the scribe Eudoxa for a little of his black.

Eudoxa laughed and gave her the ink. She went at the gate before light, painting fast, letting the brush throw its black across the wood in long sweeps, then flicking spots where the ink spat back. The red she laid on petal by petal, each one overlapping the next and darker at the root, so they seemed to lean out from the boards. The stars she left underneath, grey and small, because a dyer does not waste good colour on an old boast.

By noon the carter's children stood in the road with their mouths open. That evening a girl came down from the hills asking the way to the ford. She walked straight past the flowers without reading a word, and Lysa watched her go and thought the gate looked better for it. Then she went home with red to her wrists and did not once look back.