Silhouette dissolving into red petals on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A woman in profile is shown as a dark silhouette, with her hair and upper body breaking apart into swirling red petals or flowers. The shading is soft and smoky, with grey clouding behind the figure and black tones defining the body. Red ink dominates the dispersing petals, which contrast against the black and grey skin-toned background of the calf.

Realism Calf Woman Silhouette Profile Petal Red flower Smoke Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The velvet curtain has a scorch mark shaped like Ireland, and you have been counting it since the matinee began, because the audience is mostly pensioners in anoraks and the cold has got into the big top through every seam. Ray drops the spotlight on the third bar of the waltz. That is your cue. You step into the black box at the centre of the ring, the one your mother painted in 1974 and nobody has painted since, and you pull the door shut behind you.

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The trick is older than the tent. Pressed rose silk and paper petals, hundreds of them, fed up a tube in the rigging so that the figure you have been all evening seems to come apart in a spiralling red wind. Your mother built it around her own profile and handed it to you with the sequins and the bad knee. Tonight the petals catch the gas lamps and the front rows gasp, and for twelve seconds you are nothing but dark outline and red weather, which is the only honest thing this circus has left to sell.

Afterwards the ledger lies open on the caravan table. Ray has done the sums in pencil, and the figures stop at the end of March. You count petals in the sawdust instead, because it is easier. Forty-one come up in the broom. A boy from the front row has kept one, folded into a square, and he holds it out across the rope the way you might pay a ferryman.

You take it. He says it smells like a shop that sells roses, and you tell him that is where the silk came from, a shop in Lincoln that closed the year you were born. Outside, the wind lifts the rest of the petals over the car park and carries them towards the motorway, and you do not chase them.