Watercolour woman and flowers on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A fine line drawing of a woman in profile, with a loose blue and teal wash that bleeds and drips downwards from her head and body. Pink, orange and green floral shapes sit beside her, with soft colour blending across the skin. The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, with a black tank top at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Woman Profile Flower Wash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came over the Sorrel Gap at four in the afternoon, the way it always did in October, and by the time I reached the hut my sleeves were blue to the elbow. Aunt Maud had sent me up with the paint pots and a sack of salt for the goats, and she had made me promise not to stop at the chapel.

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The hut belonged to Ilse Varga, who had climbed the pass forty years earlier with a trunk of brushes and no husband. She painted women's faces on thin paper, bending over the table with her hair pinned up, and she would not let anyone watch. When I pushed open the door she was standing with a bowl of indigo water and a wet sheet pegged to the beam, letting the weather in through the shutter.

'The rain takes what it likes,' she said, and tipped the bowl. The blue ran down the paper in long threads, pooling at the hem and gathering in the folds of a dress she had drawn in two strokes. Where the drips touched the pink bloom she had laid in the corner, the petals bled orange and then green, as if the flowers were drinking the sky. I asked why she didn't stop it. She said a face drawn dry was only a face, and she had never trusted those.

We hung the sheet until morning. By dawn the woman had lost her edges and gained a river, and the flowers had crept up her profile like a second skin. Ilse wrapped the paper in oilcloth, pressed it into my hands for the valley, and said nothing about the chapel. I think she knew I'd stopped there anyway, because the blue on my wrists did not wash off for a week.