Black and grey portrait of a woman with red lips and red splashes, a neo-trad style tattoo on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman's face and red splashes on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The image shows the same forearm twice, side by side, with a tattoo of a woman's face in heavy black and grey shading. Her dark hair has red accents, and bold red brushstroke shapes cover the upper edge, a hanging ornament and the lower section. The linework is loose and the composition is cropped close to the face, with a black and grey block and red strokes filling the lower arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Night shift, ward six, 3 a.m. The lift has jammed between floors again, so I've been walking the stairs with the linen trolley and a cold tea. Mr Pendry in bay two has asked me three times whether the woman on the corridor wall is his late wife. She isn't. She's Agnes's work, painted in the spring when she was still well enough to hold a brush, and the red splashes she flicked across the top of the picture still look wet under the strip lights.

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Agnes called the painting Lantern Girl. She hung a paper lantern from a wire at the side of the frame and drew its red cord down to the skirting board so nobody could mistake it for decoration. Every night I check the bulb inside is still lit. Nobody asked me to. I just think a picture with that much colour in it should be looked after.

Tonight Mr Pendry asked me to take him down to see her. I wheeled him along in the chair with the squeaky front wheel, and he sat in front of the painting for a long while, tapping the armrest the way he does when he's counting something. Then he said, quite clearly, that his wife had never once worn lipstick that red, and that Agnes had always known it.

I didn't argue. I switched off the corridor light so only the lantern glowed and the splashes seemed to drip. The lift shuddered, came free, and somewhere below a door sighed shut. I wrote the time in the log: 3.40, all quiet on six, the lady on the wall still waiting for her tea.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.