Colour traditional tattoo of a woman's face framed by flowers and a red rose, with gold hoop earrings and a fringed shawl, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional woman portrait with roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman's face in a fringed shawl, with dark hair swept back and decorated with orange and pink flowers, and a red rose with green leaves on the left. The linework is bold and black, with flat solid fills and smooth shading on the skin tones. Bright red, orange, green and gold dominate against the dark hair and black outlines, and the design fills the frame on a forearm.

Traditional Forearm Woman Portrait Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the damsons had gone soft enough to bruise if you only looked at them, and Aunt Hester had me up the long ladder before the dew was off. "Mind the wasps," she said, which was her way of saying nothing else. I had my basket on its strap and my mind on the tin box in the potting shed, where a letter with a rose stamp had been waiting since Tuesday.

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Hester had told fortunes at the Hereford hop fair before the war, and she still kept the painted shawl folded in camphor at the bottom of her wardrobe. The fringe had been red once and was brown now, and every bead of it clicked when she shook it out. She said the women in the booths always wore gold hoops the size of saucers, so the farmers could see them coming across the field and feel brave enough to pay.

The letter was from my cousin Dora, who had not written in nine years. She was coming back on the Thursday bus, and she was bringing a man in a green coat whose name she had not spelled out. I brought it down the ladder and held it out, and Hester read it standing in the long grass with a windfall in her other hand. She did not say anything for a long time. Then she went indoors and came back with the hoops, dull with polish, and fixed them in her ears without a mirror.

"We'll do the far row first," she said. "Dora always did like to arrive to a full basket."

We worked until the light went orange over the hedge, the two of us between the trees, the wasps drunk and slow on the fallen fruit, and every time I looked up the gold hoops were catching the sun like something that had decided to stay.