Black and grey ornamental scrollwork tattoo across a shirtless man's shoulder and chest, with his face hidden by a white cowboy hat.

Black scrollwork tattoo on shoulder and chest

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man stands beside an open car door, wearing a white cowboy hat that hides his face, with jeans and a dark belt. A large black ornamental scroll design with swirling tribal-style elements covers his left shoulder and spreads across the upper chest. The ink is solid black with grey shading, and the photo has a muted, high-contrast look against a background of trees and a house.

Shoulder Chest Scrollwork Ornamental Tribal Jeans Car

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lord of Caddon Keep wanted a gate that would stop wolves and still look like lace, and the smith told him the two things could not be made by one pair of hands. He made it anyway. It took the whole of one winter, with his daughter Elin working the bellows and the forge smoke getting into her hair until the village children called her the chimney.

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Every curl was hammered cold from a bar of black iron, each scroll turning back on itself the way the river turned below the walls. When the gate was hung, the lord walked through it, looked up at the swirls and said it was ugly, and paid half the price. The smith took the coins and said nothing.

Years went by. The lord's sons quarrelled, the roof of the great hall fell in, and the wolves came back to the valley, as wolves do when nobody is watching the walls. Elin, grown and widowed and living in the gatehouse, found the gate still standing on its hinges with the castle gone around it. She sat beneath the ironwork each evening with her mending, and the scrolls threw their shadows across her lap like writing she could almost read.

One night a grey wolf came down to the gate, sniffed at the bars, and sat. It did not go in. Elin left the lamp burning in the gatehouse window until morning, and the wolf was still sitting there when the light came up grey over the hill, its breath curling through the iron.