Colour traditional-style tattoo on a forearm showing a split face, with a golden-haired woman on one side and a green-skinned horned woman on the other, a dragon head above and a pink rose below.

Split face portrait with dragon and rose on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A split-face design fills the forearm, with a golden-haired woman on the left and a green-skinned horned woman with dark wings on the right, divided by a vertical line. A dragon head sits above the faces, and a pink rose with green leaves and thorny vines lies below them. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill the design, with a faint grey tattoo visible near the wrist.

Traditional Forearm Woman Dragon Horn Wing Rose Thorn Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Ashgrove House had been broken since Tuesday, so Mrs Dryden and I took the stairs together, fourteen flights, her carrier bag of library books knocking against my shin at every turn. She was eighty-one and still insisted on reading fairy stories aloud to anyone who would stand still on the landing. Tonight it was the christening tale, the one where the thirteenth guest arrives uninvited.

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"Every version gets the wicked one wrong," she said, stopping on the eleventh floor to catch her breath. "She wasn't cursed out of spite. Somebody left her off the cake order, and she got tired of being the afterthought." She laughed, a wheezy sound that bounced off the concrete. I told her the council should have sorted the lift years ago. She said the only thing anybody ever fixed for free in those stories was a spinning wheel.

Her front door on the fourteenth floor had a rose painted across it by her grandson, the petals chipped and the thorns scratched in with a biro. Inside, the kettle was already warm. She put the library books on the table and slid out an old picture book with a cracked spine, the pages gone soft as cloth. Two women faced each other across a double spread, one golden and laughing, the other green and horned, a dragon's head rising above them both, and between them a single pink rose.

"Read it properly," she said. "Both voices. The dark one never wanted the crown. She wanted the view from the top, same as everyone up here."

I read it aloud while the kettle went cold. When I finished, she was asleep in her armchair with the book open on her knee. I took the stairs down slowly, doing the voices under my breath, and at the ground floor the lift doors opened by themselves, bright and humming, as if it had only been waiting for someone to stop talking.