Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a shield with white acanthus leaf scrolls around a circle, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackwork shield and leaf scroll on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black shield-shaped panel sits on the inner forearm, with a pale circle left as clear skin at its centre. Symmetrical white acanthus-style leaves curl up each side of the circle, shaded in grey against the black fill. The tattoo is black and grey only, and the arm fills the centre of the frame against a plain pale green-yellow wall, with a second dark tattoo partly visible on the upper arm.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Shield Circle Leaves Acanthus Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bailiff of Harrowmere left the gate unbarred, so the wolves came up the causeway and sat on the steps like tenants waiting for rent. Mab Tallow went out to meet them with a shield on her arm. It was black as a crow's back, the old house shield that had hung over the hall hearth since the Harrow lords rode south and never came home. A siege arrow had burned clean through its middle, and through that round hole the sky showed.

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The grey wolf rose and walked to the edge of the doorlight. Mab knew the tale her gran told at the peat fire: a shield with a hole in it lets you look at what is coming. She lifted it and set the hole to her eye. Down the south road she saw a cart with one lamp, and beside the lamp a man who had not been invited, counting the gateposts with his finger.

She went back inside and fetched the carved leaves from the hall beam, the ones her grandfather had cut for the shield's border, and she nailed them to the wood so they curled up either side of the hole like a pair of hands. Then she tied the shield to the gatepost, facing the road, and the wolves lay down in its shade.

The man turned his cart around before dawn. By spring the ivy had climbed the leaves and filled the hole, and the moon, which had always come through it, had to find another way in.