Jhi Belle’rose (Painting)

Painted in the style of the Tara’Kuran grand masters, this portrait is made with inks and watercolours, not with heavy oils. It depicts a slender half elven woman in mid movement, almost like a dance. Her long black hair swirls around her in a graceful, natural yet geometric spiral. One leg is raised and crossed over with another, as if in a ballet swirl. She has sharp features and bright green eyes, though the contours of her face reveal an Eastern heritage, intermixed with elven lineage, she is deathly pale.

She wears a simple silken garb, a wrap of black and red silk that covers her chest, and drops down in a hanging loincloth, but leaves her legs and arms bare. These arms and legs are covered in swirling patterns of black and red ink.

The tattoo on her right bicep is of a collection of roses, each with sharp, nasty thorns upon them – vivid enough to prick the flesh of any who look upon it. Upon the other arm is the image of a shadowy raven a rose clutched in it’s beak.

Finally on her right thigh and running all the way down her leg is another tattoo of a rose, the colours bright and vivid.

In one hand she holds what at quick glance might be thought a sword, but on closer inspection is in fact a line of crimson blood, shaped into the form of some blade or other. The blood ruins from her wrists, a part of her, made into a weapon and wielded in a blade dance.

The scene behind her is of night, with a full moon large. A cherry blossom tree can also be seen, though it’s blossoms are crimson rather than pink or white. Tangled around the dancing woman’s feet is a bush of thorned roses, also crimson. For artistic whimsy, the rose thorns tangle and intertwine with the rose tattoos on the woman’s body, as if she is becoming one with that tangling, vicious plant.

Finally the woman’s expression is distant, neutral, and indeed the more one examines the painting, the more one finds it oddly enigmatic. It’s difficult to see if the woman is truly dancing amidst the sharp tangle of roses in some complex, bloody manor, or struggling against their vicious entrapment.