Black ornamental scrollwork tattoo with swirls and pointed leaf-like forms across the inner wrist and back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ornamental scrollwork across a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ornamental tattoo made of curling scrolls, pointed leaf-like forms and interlaced filigree-style shapes. The design runs across the wrist toward the back of the hand, with bold solid lines and open curls. It is shown in black ink on light skin against a blurred warm wooden background.

Forearm Hand Scrollwork Ornament Swirl Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hobday said the scroll should look as if it had grown rather than been bent, so I had spent three weeks teaching flat bar to curl without cracking. The forge in Attercliffe was hot enough to blister my knuckles, and the gate for Mrs Ashdown's garden lay across two trestles like a drawing that had been folded too often. Every leaf point wanted to be a little sharper than the last.

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On the Thursday, with the light going brown through the soot-glass, I finished the last panel and stood it against the wall. Hobday came out wiping his hands on a rag. He walked the length of it slowly, touching each open curl with one thick finger, and stopped where the pointed leaves ran into the filigree. "You've closed the wrong loop," he said. "Look at it from the far side. It's a hand, not a gate."

I looked, and he was right. From the lane it read as a hand reaching out, fingers spread then folding back on themselves, the way Mrs Ashdown had held her gloves the afternoon she came to order it. I had not meant that. I knocked the panel loose, heated the joint white, and drew the loop open again until the leaves pointed away from the house instead of toward it.

When we hung it on the Friday, the old lady stood at the gate with her cane and said nothing for a long while. Then she pressed one of the curls with her palm, the way you'd test a loaf, and said the garden would finally be let out. I still do not know what she meant. The scrolls still catch the sun on that lane, and I still find myself opening my own hand when I pass.