Black and grey realism tattoo of a carved Mayan stone relief with a central face and glyphs, on an upper arm.

Carved Mayan stone relief on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a circular carved stone panel with a central face mask surrounded by glyph-like markings, with two seated figures in relief below. The shading is black and grey, with strong highlights and deep shadows that give the carving a three-dimensional, weathered stone look. The composition fills the upper arm edge to edge, with the circular panel centred and the figures sitting in the lower section.

Realism Upper arm Glyph Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift yourselves nearer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she's had her eye on your supper since the bread came out. Right. The stone at the edge of Hollin Wood, the round one with the face in the middle, you've all walked past it on the way to the mill. Old Gran Asher used to say it was a door that had forgotten how to open.

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Her grandmother's grandmother was the one who found it, the summer the beeches came down in the gale. Roots had lifted a slab the size of a cartwheel, and under the moss was that face, cheeks puffed like a man holding his breath, and round its rim a ring of little carved signs nobody could read. The vicar wanted it moved to the churchyard. The miller wanted it broken up for hearthstones. Two men with two ropes tried to drag it down the hill, and by morning both ropes had frayed clean through, and the men had gone quiet and would not say why.

So it stayed. Every spring the girls of the village pressed a fingertip to the signs and counted them under their breath, and every spring the count came out different, so nobody could ever say how many doors there were.

Then came the year of the long frost, when a boy from the lower farm went up with a lantern to ask the face a question about his father's cough. He came back at dawn with frost on his eyelashes and nothing in his hands. He said the two stone men kneeling below the face had lifted their heads, looked at him, and bent down again. He never said what he asked. He only said the answer was in the cough, which was no answer at all, and his father was up and about by Easter.