Fine line and watercolour wash tattoo of a woman in a purple top with red hair and lips, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour figure of a woman on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A fine black line drawing shows a woman from the shoulders up, with her face left blank except for red lips and a loose red wash over the hair. Soft purple watercolour washes fill the top she is wearing, and the lines fade out in places to suggest a loose, sketched outline. The piece sits on the inner upper arm and is shown against a floral sleeve and a plastic wrap in the background.

Fine line Upper arm Woman Figure Portrait Watercolour wash Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye-house on Tanners Row smelled of alum and wet wool, and Ada Kell was the only one of the four girls who could keep a face in her head long enough to draw it. Mr Pargeter bought her a tin of watercolour cakes from the stationer's in Leeds the spring she turned fourteen, on the condition she did not waste his time on pictures. She drew at the drying racks instead, in the gap between one vat and the next, while the cloth hung above her in purple ropes.

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She drew the women who came in to collect their husbands' shirts and their sisters' shawls. She gave each of them a dab of madder on the lips, because that was the colour she had most of, and she left the faces pale. When Mrs Hirst asked why her own face was missing from the page, Ada said the paper had not wanted it. Mrs Hirst laughed so hard she dropped her parcel in the gutter, and two of the other girls started calling Ada the Blank Painter after that.

The rag-and-bone man paid a penny for the whole stack one wet November, and Ada let him take them without a word. Weeks later she saw one of her drawings propped in the window of the chemist's on Briggate, the purple washed across a stranger's shoulders, and she stood in the rain until the shop lamp came on. Nobody had thought to fill in the faces, and somehow they had not needed it.

Years later Ada pinned the last of her sketches above the drying racks and let the damp take the paper. The lips held their colour longest. People said that was the madder, and Ada let them say it.