Woman taking a mirror selfie with her phone raised, showing black and grey tattoos on her arms, in a room with a shell-decorated archway and a table lamp.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arm tattoos in a shell archway mirror selfie

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on the floor in a mirror selfie, holding a black phone up in front of her face so only her hair and lower face area are partly visible. Her arms carry dark tattoos that appear to be black and grey, with shading across the upper arm and forearm. The composition is framed by an arched mirror decorated with shells and dried flowers, with a warm lamp and soft interior light behind her.

Upper arm Forearm Woman Arm tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp in the shell grotto below St Anselm's had to be trimmed before the evening bell, and Brother Osric always forgot the wick until the light had already started to smoke. He would climb the cold stone steps with his brass key and his hands smelling of tallow, and the novice Wynn would hold the candle for him because she was the only one who did not complain about the damp. The arch had been built by the fishing brothers of the old days. Every shell pressed into its curve had been brought up from the tide by a widow or a mother, and each had a name scratched on its underside that nobody had bothered to read in a hundred years.

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Wynn asked once why the arch needed a mirror set into its back wall. Osric said the mirror was for the sea, so that the boats out past the headland could see the lamp twice and know they were not alone. He said a single flame looked feeble from a long way off, but a flame held in glass looked like a town. Wynn did not believe him until the autumn gale came down off the water and the wind blew the lamp out in the middle of the night, and it was her own face she saw first in the glass, pale and wet, with the dried roses hanging above it like little rags of weather.

She struck the flint three times before the spark took. The mirror caught the small light and gave it back a hundred times over, pale gold running down through the shells and onto the flagstones. Far out, a lantern swung, then steadied, then turned toward the harbour mouth. In the morning the tide had washed a broken oar onto the shingle and left the lamp still warm in its brass cup, and Osric stood a long time looking at the glass before he said that she had trimmed the wick too short.