Black and grey scrollwork tattoo with swirling shapes and shading on a forearm, beside a leather strap and stacked leather bracelets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey scrollwork on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a large tattoo of swirling, scroll-like forms with rounded shapes and dark solid areas. The shading moves from deep black to lighter grey, giving the design depth across the skin. The man wears a navy shirt, a striped fabric strap with a dark leather clip, jeans and a chain, and the tattoo fills the left side of the frame.

Forearm Scrollwork Swirl Ornamental Shading

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The lost property cupboard at Hollin Cross has finally given up its secret, and you'll laugh. Behind the crate of umbrellas Mrs Pether left in 1987 there was a cloth bundle tied with string, and inside it were six iron scrolls, each about the size of a side plate. They are heavy, dark things, curled like cats' tails, with solid black hollows where someone had filed the metal back to bare. Nobody ever claimed them. The luggage tag on the string said only 'for the gate, if they ever mend it'.

The gate I mean is the wrought one by platform two, the one that lost its top half in the February gales. I have been telling the station master for a year that it's past saving. He says the Council has no money, and the Council says the railway owns it, so the gate stays as it is, all bent and sorry. Last Thursday I held one of the scrolls against the bare stub of the upright, and the bolt holes lined up as if someone had measured them that morning. The smoke from the 4.10 came up under the canopy and seemed to follow the curl of the iron, round and round, before it drifted off over the sidings.

Old Ned, the signalman, stood beside me with his flask and said his father had forged the pieces at the works in Cross Keld before the war. He said they had always been meant to go somewhere, and that it was a poor sort of man who lets good iron sit in a cupboard for forty years.

I've fixed it. Come up at Easter and see the top half of the gate, black and curling against the sky. Bring your good spanner, and don't tell Mrs Pether I used her string.

Yours, Dan