Black and grey scrollwork sleeve on an arm
Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo
The tattoo covers most of an arm with ornate scrollwork, curling swirls and acanthus-style leaves. The linework is soft and the forms are built with fine grey shading that gives the leaves and curls a raised, three-dimensional look. The design is entirely black and grey against a dark background, and the composition runs vertically along the limb.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
You reach the gatehouse at Vell Saddle just as the cloud drops, and the old iron gate is already groaning on one hinge. Brother Anselm hands you a lantern and a folded drawing, the foliage traced by a smith who has been dead for sixty years. Every acanthus leaf is shaded with a thumb's breadth of grey, so the iron seems to lift off the bar as if a wind were pushing it.
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The work takes three days. You file the scrolls clean, weld the curl that frost split in two, and notice that the leaves on the left panel were cut by a different hand, deeper, their tips turned down as though listening to the ground. Anselm says the first smith quarrelled with the second over which way the vine should climb. Neither would give way, so the gate was hung with both.
On the last evening you roll the gate across the threshold on its wooden runners. The mist is thick and the pass has gone silent except for a dog barking far below. You lift the latch and the two halves meet in the middle, where the scrolls cross and the shadows sit in the hollows of every leaf.
The gate closes with a sound like a held breath let go. In the morning the fog has lifted, the leaves throw their shadows down the slope, and the road you climbed looks, for the first time, as though it was drawn that way on purpose.
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