Blackwork botanical tattoo of swirling vines and a rose covering the back of a hand and the forearm, resting on a wooden table.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackwork vine and rose sleeve on hand and forearm

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand and forearm rest palm down on a wooden table, covered with a dense tattoo of swirling vines, leaves and a rose-like form. The design is mostly solid black ink, with the untouched skin forming the fine, curling linework and the negative-space outlines of the leaves. The composition runs from the knuckles over the wrist and up the forearm, with a paper and pencil visible at the top right edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

Keep reading

The rain has been coming sideways off the tip all week, and Mrs Pryce's gate is black with it, but I've been out on the back wall with the ink pot anyway. You'll laugh. I've taken to drawing the honeysuckle that grew over the coal shed before your father had the roof off it. Every leaf I fill in solid, black as the seam, and then I leave the thin lines of the veins and the curls of the stems bare, so the paper shows through like light getting in under a door.

Mr Haddow from the lamp room asked what I was doing, and I told him I was making a garden nobody could dig up. He didn't get it. He hasn't been underground since the fall at number four, and his hands shake when he holds his tea. I gave him the first sheet anyway, a rose in the middle of the vines, its petals curled tight the way yours used to when you were small and wouldn't open your fist.

Your father always said the men who came up black were the ones who kept their faces clean for us. I think he was half right. The dust gets into everything, but the drawing only holds what you choose to leave open.

I've put the next sheet in with this, the one for the cuff of your shirt, where the vines run up past the wrist and nobody at the baths will see them. Come home when the shift lets you, and bring the pencil I left on the sill.

Love, Mam

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