Woman in white lingerie standing in a kitchen, showing a sleeve tattoo of flowers and figures across her upper arm, forearm and side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeve tattoo with flowers on arm and side

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with long dark hair, turned away from the camera, stands at a kitchen counter in white lingerie. Her arm, upper back and side are covered by a large tattoo of flowers and figures, with dark linework and areas of pink and red. The shot is taken from the side, with the tattoo running from the upper arm down the ribs.

Upper arm Forearm Ribs Flower Figure Sleeve Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Haverlun, nobody painted peonies without a licence from the Guild of Lacquer, and my master had lost his licence in the winter of the flood. So when the Lady Serrin commissioned a screen of her dead husband's garden, I took the work in my own name and painted it at night by a single tallow lamp, my knuckles stained the colour of old wine.

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The figures came first, as they always do in that old work: a heron, a boatwoman, a child with a paper lantern, all drawn in black lines so fine they looked like hair. The peonies I left for last. I mixed their red from petals my mother had dried in jars, and when I laid the first bloom across the lower panel, the lamp guttered and the boatwoman turned her head.

I blamed my tiredness. Then I found the screen empty in the morning, the heron gone from its reeds, the child's lantern bobbing somewhere past the garden wall. Wet ink tracks led down the stairs and out into the frost, across the Lady's dug-up lawn where a road had been started and never finished.

I followed them as far as the old ferry steps. The boatwoman was waiting there with the heron on her shoulder, and she held out my brush, its bristles heavy with red. Paint the way home, she said. So I did, one bloom at a time, until the screen was whole again and the pale peony in the corner had begun to open, a little redder than the rest.