Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stylised girl with a red heart and branch motifs on a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Stylised girl figure on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised figure of a girl with large eyes and a hat stands at the centre of the design, surrounded by sketchy linework, geometric hatching and stippled lace-like patterns. A small red heart on a thin stem and a leafy branch sit near the shoulder, with a few dotted panels filling the background. Black and grey ink dominates, with the red heart as the only clear colour, and the design wraps across the upper arm and onto the shoulder.

Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Girl Figure Heart Branch Lace pattern Geometric pattern Hat Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sister Agnes had been told the lace would be finished by Lady Day, and she had told the Mother Superior that it would be, which was not the same thing at all. Her bobbins clicked on the table by the cloister window. Outside, the apple trees were coming into leaf, and the bees had found the wall where the lichen grew in pale rounds.

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She was working a pattern for the sacristy altar cloth, a net of tiny hexagons with a girl worked into the middle of it. Sister Agnes had invented the girl herself, months before, when the pattern refused to close. The girl wore a hat like an upturned pie dish and held a branch that kept sprouting leaves no matter how often it was pruned. Each night Sister Agnes unpicked her, and each morning the girl came back a little more crooked than before.

Brother Anselm found her at vespers, standing with her hands full of thread. "The bishop's man comes on Thursday," he said. "He wants the cloth for the feast."

"Then he'll have it."

"It has a girl in it."

"Every good thing has a girl in it," she said, though she had never thought so until that moment. She drew the last thread tight, and the dotted panels around the figure lay flat and quiet, dark as ink. One single red silk thread she had saved for a heart on a thin stalk near the hem, and it looked, in the candlelight, like a drop that had not yet fallen.

On Thursday the bishop's man unfolded the cloth in the chapter house and was silent a long while. Then he touched the small red heart at the hem, and Sister Agnes saw his lips move as if he were praying, or remembering. He asked no questions. He rolled the cloth carefully, the girl folded inward, and carried it out into the sun.