Traditional style colour tattoo of a purple fan with red and blue flowers and green leaves, placed on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional fan with flowers on the leg

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A lilac fan with a dark outline and a row of red flowers across its panels sits above a cluster of blue and red flowers with olive-green leaves. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with small dark dots scattered across the fan. The design is centred on the skin with partial tattoos visible at the top and right edges of the frame.

Traditional Other Fan Flower Leaves Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fan is still warm from the cloakroom radiator when Nell presses it into your hand at the foot of the stairs, the lilac silk gone soft at the folds. Upstairs the Palais Verde is emptying, and the band has stopped the last waltz because the drummer has gone out for chips. You open the fan without thinking. Red flowers stand up on every panel, each one with a little stalk of olive leaves, and someone has stippled dark dots between them like rain on a window.

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Her grandmother carried it to every dance in Birkenhead from 1951 until her hip gave out, Nell says, and never once used it to cool herself. It was for hiding her mouth when a man said something stupid. You tell her the fan has seen a lot of stupid men. She tells you that is why it has a black edge, to keep the worst of them out.

The rain has stopped by the time you reach the bus shelter on Duke Street. Nell digs through her bag for a bus pass while you hold the fan closed, and under the sodium lamp the blue flower at its base looks almost black, then almost violet, as you turn it. A taxi hisses past with its roof light off. Nobody else is waiting.

The number 47 comes round the corner with its windows fogged. Nell is up the step and gone before you think to say the fan is still in your hand. You run after the bus and rap on the glass. She laughs, lifts her hand, and mouths keep it till Thursday. Then the bus pulls away with her face at the window, one palm moving slowly back and forth against the glass, as if it were far too hot in there.