Black and grey traditional style flash sheet showing six drawn designs including a rose, a dagger, a wreath, an eye with rope and a pendant, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey flash sheet of six designs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink flash sheet on cream paper, with six separate tattoo designs arranged across the page. The designs include a rose, a dagger, a leafy wreath, an eye wrapped in rope, a jewelled pendant and branch or fern motifs. The linework is bold and the shading is in grey tones, with a traditional look and open space between each design.

Traditional Botanical Rose Dagger Wreath Leaves Eye Rope Pendant Jewel Fern Branch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, for I am too old to fetch another and too stubborn to stop talking. You want Brother Osric and the stolen pendant? Then hush, and listen to the rope creak, because that is how he always began his own telling.

Keep reading

Osric kept the bell tower in the winter the river froze to the mill wheel. He had one good eye and a rope of plaited hemp that he swore had been spun by the first monk to climb those stairs. Each night he sat above the cloister and watched the lane through a gap in the stone, and each night he saw the same thing: the abbot's jewelled pendant, a dull oval of garnet and seed pearls, lying on the altar cloth under a lamp that never went out.

One dawn it was gone. Osric went down with his dagger tucked in his belt, the blade he used for cutting bread, and found the chapter door wreathed in holly the boys had hung for the feast. Under the holly, pressed into the rotten wood, lay a single fern frond, green and fresh in the snow. It led him past the rose garden, where the frost had blackened every bloom but one, and down into the ravine where the bracken grew higher than a man's head. He found the thief sitting on a stone with the pendant in his lap, a cook's boy of perhaps twelve, crying because he had only wanted to see whether it was real. Osric did not raise his blade. He knelt, took the boy's wrist, and wound the bell rope around them both until they were bound to the same stone like kindling. 'Now,' he said, 'you will know what it is to be watched.'

The boy never stole again, and the pendant went back to the altar. Osric's rope still hangs in the tower, knotted at the end where his hands held it. Mind you don't tug it, lads. That knot is his, and it has never once come undone.