Realism tattoo of a woman wearing a gold Venetian mask with blue feathers, a peacock feather and a red flower across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Venetian mask and peacock feathers on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's face from the nose down, with red lips, under a gold ornate Venetian mask topped with pale blue feathers. Below the mask, a peacock feather eye and dark red flower sit among fine scrollwork and stippled dotwork shading. The image shows three angled views of the same upper arm sleeve against a white vest, with rich blues, greens, golds and reds throughout.

Realism Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Feather Peacock feather Woman Flower Filigree Lip Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gilder had already gone home when the courier brought the peacock feathers up from the Rialto steps, wrapped in oilcloth and smelling of the lagoon. Signora Anzolin counted them twice before she let me touch them. Forty-one eyes, she said, and not one may be cracked, or the Contessa will send the whole mask back with her compliments.

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The mask itself was Cesare's work, a face of gold leaf and hammered brass thin as pastry, its brows pressed out into curls like a lace collar. He had shaped the eyeholes and then stopped, unwilling to finish until he knew what kind of face it would cover. I told him it was not our business to know. Our business was the glue, the wire, and the feathers set in rows so the blue would catch lamplight at the angle of a turning dancer.

The Contessa came on the eve of Carnival in a grey cloak, and she tried the mask before the mirror without speaking. Then she asked for the dark red flower from the cabinet of dried things, and she pinned it not to the mask but to the stiff bodice of the figure Cesare had built for the display window. Nobody had asked for that.

We found the flower again in March, on the water stairs of San Marco, where it had come loose from a costume nobody claimed. Cesare kept the feather. He said a peacock's eye is only a trick the bird plays on the dark, and that a good mask does the same. I still think of the Contessa laughing behind that gold face, and of how no one in the square could tell which of them was looking out.