The Tattooed Heiress
Aimée Crocker is an eccentric millionaire in America's Gilded Age society. She's an heiress that has traveled the world, loved wildly and openly, and now has her sights set on something that will scandalize the upper crust of society, a tattoo from Yoshisuke Hori Toyo, the prodigy of the Japanese irezumi master, Hori Chiyo. This is a sample of a moment in time in a scene where I imagine how that tattoo session went. While this is likely not 100% historically accurate, I wanted to challenge myself to write a real person that did something that society would disapprove of, and still generally disapproves of.
Format
Screenplay
Length
Scene
Software
Final Draft 13
Writing Time
1 Hour, 2026
Genre
Gilded Age Period Drama
Contents
Theme
Defying Societal Expectation
Aimée is a woman of means in a society that still holds sensibilities that veer more on the traditional than the progressive. There are people that socialized with artists, philosophers, and Bohemians, but there's always been a line drawn for expectations for women and how they present themselves. For Aimée, she's a figure that defies all of it because she valued the fun of her freedom over the judgement of her peers.
Aimée Crocker - The scandalous, illustrious, mystical Queen of the Bohemians herself. When I took the prompt of writing a piece set in the Gilded Age, I was determined to find someone interesting to write about and she was it. While there are plenty of messy and problematic figures in this era, she had the audacity of a wealthy noble and the gumption of a free thinker. She rubbed elbows with creatives like Oscar Wilde and royalty like King David Kalākaua. She was an interesting person to research and break down to write for. I wanted to hit her voice and sensibilities in this moment in time as closely as I could.
Jackson Gouraud - One of Aimée's many lovers, that will eventually marry her in 1900. He's someone that's just as wild and artistic as she is. He may be from the American aristocracy, but he's not as buttoned up as his contemporaries. He was a pianist and a songwriter on Broadway who fell in love with Aimée and supported her ways and whims until death did they part. Even though he only plays a small part in this scene, I wanted to frame him as a charming guy that is just as inquisitive, but likely not quite as adventurous as his lover.
Yoshisuke Hori Toyo - A prodigy of the renowned tattoo master, Hori Chiyo. He came to America to work under Samuel F. O'Reilly with his new electric tattoo machine. There's a lot of documentation about this man's teacher, but less about him. I wanted to capture his motivations as a man that came to America to tattoo the wealthy as the practice of tattooing became illegal in Japan. From what I could find, he struck me as a man that cared about his craft and wanted to bring it into the new century with O'Reilly's new invention. These are things that I wanted to capture in his voice and actions.
Characters
Screenplay
