Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman in profile cameo with roses

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A woman in profile with dark blue hair, a green headscarf and sugar-skull style face markings is set inside an ornate gold oval frame on a red and gold starry background. Two purple roses and a pale blue rose sit at the lower edge, with scrolled filigree beneath. Bold dark outlines and smooth shading give the design a vivid, saturated colour palette.

Neo-trad Woman Profile Cameo Rose Sugar skull Scrollwork Frame Headscarf Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top still smells of sawdust and wet canvas, though it has more patches than canvas now. You are up a stepladder at dusk with a tin of gold leaf and the last good sable brush, painting a frame around the face of Madame Solenne for the third time this season. The printers in Leeds said the lettering needed to look like it cost something. Your fingers are stiff with the cold. When the light goes, you dab a silver star where the stars were meant to be, and the moon rises behind the tent poles as if it had been waiting for the cue.

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Madame Solenne was never really a madame. She was Lottie Brandt, who fell from the high wire in Carlisle and kept the wrist that never quite healed. Now she sells fortunes from a booth beside the generator, and she asked you for two purple roses and one pale blue one, because the blue was her mother's colour and the purple ones are for the cheap seats. Mr Haskett counts the takings at the ring each night, moving his lips over the coppers, and he tells you the poster is the only thing bringing people through the gate anymore.

On the last night of the season the crowd is thirty people and a dog. You finish the scrollwork along the bottom of the board, a long curl of filigree that runs off the edge so it can be picked up on the next town's bills. Lottie comes by with a cup of tea gone cold and studies the blue rose for a long time without saying a word.

In the morning the lorry leaves before you are awake. The poster is still pinned to the caravan door, the gold half-finished on one side, the swirling line of ink trailing out past the edge of the paper into the wet grass.