Close crop of a woman in a sheer black dress with her hands clasped, showing a neo-traditional woman's face with flowers on the upper arm and a lotus and tiger on the forearm.

Tattooed arms with hands clasped

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close crop shows a woman in a sheer black dress with gold star print, her face out of frame. Her upper arm carries a neo-traditional style illustration of a woman's face framed by flowers, and her forearm has a lotus and a tiger's head in mostly grey shading with some teal and green accents. Small tattoos are visible on her fingers, and the warm, slightly faded photograph shows a brown leather bag behind her.

Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Hand Woman Face Flower Lotus Tiger Star Triangle Finger tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Ravensworth House has been dead since Easter, so you climb with the shopping hooked on one finger and your phone torch clamped in your teeth. Eleven floors. On the fourth landing someone has chalked a lotus over the damp patch, its petals fanning out from a crack in the render, and beneath it a tiger's head with its jaw open, as if it has been caught mid-roar beside the bins.

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Mrs Adeyemi on seven keeps her fire door propped with a brick and a tin of Quality Street. She tells you the tiger is her husband's doing, a bit of nonsense from the Sunday he came home from the Lewisham job with paint under his nails. 'He said the lotus was for patience and the tiger was for the rest of us who couldn't be bothered to wait.' She offers you a green triangle sweet, the kind nobody wants, and you take it because refusing would only take longer.

Upstairs, the wind finds the gap under your door. You lay the shopping out on the worktop and look at the star charts you pinned up in October, cut from a magazine and never properly finished, the dots joined with biro in some places and left loose in others. Somewhere below, a bass line thumps up through the concrete. You pick up the pen and draw one more line between two stars, then another, until the constellation looks like a face you almost recognise.

In the morning the rain has washed away the chalk except for the tiger, which the wet has made sharper, its teeth brighter than they were. On the eleventh floor the lift doors shudder open by themselves for the first time since Easter. You step in anyway and press the button for the ground, as though it might be a joke you're in on.