Realistic black and grey portrait of an older man in a banknote style, with pink-tinted scrollwork and a 100 banner, tattooed on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Banknote style portrait with 100 on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of an older man with a high forehead and a high-collared garment fills the centre of the design, surrounded by swirling scrollwork. Smooth grey shading gives the face and clothing volume, while soft pink tones appear in the scrollwork. A block-lettered 100 banner sits at the bottom, and the tattoo runs the length of the lower leg.

Realism Calf Portrait Banknote Scrollwork Man Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the purse for the house of Saint Oswin, and in the winter of the great flood he counted it every night, because counting was the only thing that let him sleep. There were ninety-nine silver pieces in the iron box, each stamped with the same grave old face, and every night he came up one short of the sum the abbot needed for the roof.

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A stranger came to the gate in wet boots, carrying a bundle of stiff paper he swore was worth more than silver. Anselm had been raised to believe that a guest is a messenger in disguise, so he gave him bread and a bed by the kitchen fire. In the morning the bundle was gone from the bench. In its place lay a hundred squares, each printed with that same grave face, a curl of ferns running round its edge, and along the bottom, in letters as tall as a thumb, the figure 100.

He carried them to the market in Wyke, where the cloth merchant turned one over, sniffed it, and laughed until he had to sit down on a barrel. "Paper, brother. Paper with a fine face on it." Anselm walked home slowly through the mud and said nothing to the abbot. Instead he stood on the bridge and considered the river, which had already taken the fields and the sheep and would take anything else offered to it.

He let them go one at a time, watching each square tip and spin on the brown water until it was only a pale fleck among the reeds. The ninety-nine silver pieces he gave to the abbot the next morning, every one. The roof was mended before Candlemas, and when the abbot asked after the missing coin, Anselm only smiled and said the river had taken its share.