Black and grey scrollwork tattoo on a forearm, with shaded acanthus-style swirls set against a solid black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey scrollwork on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows large, shaded scrolls and leaf-like curls that twist down the forearm, with some foliage visible near the top of the arm. The solid black fill behind the scrolls makes the pale, highlighted forms stand out. The photo is taken from above, with a hand at the bottom of the frame and a wooden floor and black leather surface in the background.

Blackwork Realism Forearm Scrollwork Acanthus Swirl Leaf Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The scaffold at St Aldhelm's came down on Friday, and Mr Pardoe has finally let me near the ceiling. Forty feet of plaster over the south aisle, and the great acanthus scrolls that the Victorians painted over are beginning to show again beneath the limewash. He gave me a bone folder, a rag and a pot of putty, and told me the leaves must look as though they were cut by someone who had never once been in a hurry. I have spent three days on a single curl. Every time I think it is finished, the light from the clerestory moves and throws a shadow in the wrong place.

The trouble is the black. Where the old varnish has crazed and lifted, the plaster beneath is dark with a century of candle smoke, and I have to lay the pale curls against it so the eye reads them as lifting off the wall. Pardoe says a good scroll is mostly the shadow you leave alone. I used to think he was being cryptic. Now I think he simply has no patience for explaining what his hands already know.

Yesterday, under the lowest leaf of the largest scroll, I found a little mark scratched into the wet plaster. Two letters and a date, 1743, no bigger than a barleycorn. Someone stood on a ladder that long ago and wanted it known that he had been there. I called Pardoe over, expecting him to tell me to scrape it away, but he only looked for a long while and then said, "Leave it be. It's his."

This morning I did something I'm not sure I'm allowed to do. I cut my own initials on the underside of the leaf beside his, and a tiny curl no larger than my thumbnail. Nobody will look for it. That is rather the point, I suppose.

Write soon and tell me the bakery hasn't burnt down without you.

All my love, Annie