Colour tattoo of a seated woman with flowing hair and draped robes, drawn in an Art Nouveau manner with bold black outlines, on a forearm near the wrist.

Seated woman with flowing hair on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A seated woman with long, flowing hair leans forward, with draped fabric over her lap and a stylised tree or branch pattern behind her. Bold black outlines define the figure, with orange-brown fill and grey shading on the hair and background. The design fills a band across the forearm against a bright green wall.

Forearm Woman Figure Drapery Branches Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hem was the trouble. Ada had sent the silk back twice, saying the fall of it looked like wet washing on a line, so I sat on an upturned crate in the back room of the Palais with pins between my lips until the gas lamps went grey over the bandstand. Beyond the door the band was tuning for the Saturday waltz, a cornet picking at the same four notes again and again.

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The tableau was called The Waiting Wood, and Mr Feeney had painted the backcloth himself: branches black as stove iron, twisting up into a sky he had mixed from ash and the blue of a Sunday milk bottle. Ada was to sit in the middle of it all with drapery over her knees and her hair loose, shaded grey at the edges so it seemed to drift off the canvas. Everyone agreed it was the finest thing the hall had ever put up. I only wanted the hem to lie flat.

On the night, the curtain rose on cue and the room hushed the way it always did. Ada sat, leaned forward, and held the pose for exactly as long as the cornet took to finish its phrase. Then, instead of rising to bow, she stepped off the edge of the platform and went down the centre aisle in her bare feet, the silk trailing behind her like a river nobody had thought to dam. Mr Feeney swore. The band kept playing. Somebody at the back started clapping in time.

I stayed in the wings with my pincushion, unpicking the stitches I had set so carefully. When the last of the crowd had gone home, I found a flake of gold leaf caught in the hem, a scrap from the painted branches, and I pressed it flat between two pages of my order book so that it would keep.