Black and grey chest tattoo of a cameo portrait in an oval frame, surrounded by symmetrical ornate scrollwork across the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cameo portrait with scrollwork on chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical chest piece centres on a cameo-style portrait of a woman's head and shoulders in profile, set inside an oval frame. The cameo is rendered in soft grey shading with highlights, while the surrounding acanthus-like scrollwork and leaves are shaded in dark grey and black. The image is a close crop of the upper chest and collarbones, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Chest Cameo Portrait Woman Profile Scrollwork Acanthus Leaves Oval frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gorringe would not let me touch the shell until I had drawn the leaves forty times on squared paper. Acanthus, he said, grows the way grief does, always reaching for the light and never quite getting there, and a carver who cannot draw a curl will never make a face breathe. So I drew curls at the bench in the back room on Frederick Street, while the gas hissed and the rain came sideways off the Jewellery Quarter roofs.

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The commission came in October, in a brown envelope with no name on it. Inside was a photograph of a woman in a high collar with a sad, closed mouth, and a note in a hand so careful it looked forged. A profile, the head turned to the left, set in an oval frame to match the one hanging in our window. Gorringe read it twice and passed it to me. Carve her as she was, the note said, not as the photograph was taken. I did not understand that until the third week.

The shell was a pale conch from a Liverpool dealer, layered like thin cream. I cut down through the top layer to the brown beneath, so the face would come up white against the dark, and the work went slowly, a hair's width at a time. Gorringe sat behind me with his pipe unlit and told me to stop when the nose was right, not when it was pretty. When I finished the shoulders, the woman's chin lifted a little, as if someone had called her name from the hall.

The envelope came back a fortnight later with one line in the same careful hand: Yes. That is her. Gorringe set the brooch in a plain silver mount and wrapped it in tissue. I asked him whose face it was. He only said that the scrolls would outlast her, because the sitter had never once in her life been still long enough to be drawn.