A woman in a straw hat and polka dot top shows a colour floral tattoo on her upper arm, with black tattoos on her forearm and thigh, and a black tattoo on her lower leg.

Woman in straw hat with arm and leg tattoos

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full-length photograph of a woman standing in front of a dense green hedge, holding a woven basket with yellow flowers and tipping a straw hat with one hand. Her upper arm has a colour floral tattoo in red and green, and black linework tattoos are visible on her forearm, thigh and lower leg, with a dark tattoo partly visible at her waist. The even daylight and plain background keep the focus on the tattoos and the outfit.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Thigh Calf Flower Leaves Mask Hat Basket

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My aunt sold yellow broom from a woven basket on the harbour steps of Kalyra, and she never let a customer pay for stems that had gone limp. 'Those are for the goats,' she said, and sent me up the track with them every evening that summer. I was nine, and I thought the goats had the best of every bargain.

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The mask hung above the coffee tins in her shop, a face carved from pale olive wood with its mouth pulled into a grin that was not quite a grin. Nobody on the island touched it after dark. Dimitri, who mended nets on the quay, said a carver had made it for a widow he could not have, and had painted his jealousy into the cheeks so every visitor would see it and leave her alone. My aunt said that was the kind of story men told when they had lost at cards.

One night in August the wind came round from the west, and the old ivy on the church wall began knocking at the shutters like someone wanting in. I took the mask down to hush it. The broom in my basket turned its heads toward the sea as though it had been called by name, so I carried everything down the steps to the water's edge, the mask in one hand and the flowers in the other.

The sea was flat and bright. I held the mask out over it and waited. Nothing came. Then a single silver fish rose beside the steps, looked up with one unblinking eye, and slid back under. When I climbed home my aunt was waiting in the doorway with a lamp. She took the mask from me without a word and hung it back above the coffee tins, its grin no different at all, except that now it seemed to be listening to the sea.