Colourful traditional arm sleeve on the upper arm and forearm, with a woman's face in grey and pink, a red rose, a dagger and a butterfly.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional arm sleeve with woman, rose and butterfly

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve in traditional style shows a woman's face framed by dark grey hair at the centre, with a red rose at the top left and a butterfly on the right. Smaller elements include a dagger, a partly visible ribbon banner and flowers. Bold black outlines carry solid fills of red, yellow, green and pink, and the background is a plain pale wall.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Woman Portrait Rose Butterfly Dagger Flower Banner Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you're letting the sea in. Aye, that's the one. Forty summers that face has hung over the Gaiety Booth, and I painted it in a single wet Tuesday when the rain got under the tent flap and a pot of vermilion went over my boot. Mrs Pallant wanted her sister's face. She'd brought a photograph gone soft as a biscuit, and I did what I could with it, which was more than she expected and less than she hoped.

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The rose went top left because the girl in the photo always wore one behind her ear. The dagger went low because her husband had thrown knives at a board in the back room of the Dolphin and never once hit what he aimed for, so Mrs Pallant said it should stay in the picture as a warning to anyone who thought they knew where a thing would land. The butterfly came last. I put it there for luck, and because the light off the bay makes its wings look like they're still deciding whether to leave.

That winter the booth was boarded up and nobody bothered with the painting. In March a lad from the chip shop came asking me to touch up the banner, the ribbon curling under the chin. I lifted the sheet to get at it and found a second name underneath, in letters so small you'd need a magnifier, which I hadn't got. Mrs Pallant had asked me to leave the ribbon blank. I hadn't. I'd written her sister's name where nobody would look, and she'd never once asked me to scrape it off.

Every autumn the tide comes up to the bottom step and the dagger goes a shade darker in the damp. The butterfly still looks ready to go. I tell the lads it's just the light.