Realistic black and grey tattoo of a carved Mesoamerican-style stone relief, with a seated figure in a circular calendar ring, across the upper arm and shoulder.

Carved stone relief tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, depicting a carved stone panel with a seated figure in a headdress at the centre of a circular ring of glyphs. Scrolling ornamental motifs and stone block edges frame the design below and around it. The shading is grey and black, with strong highlights that give the carving a three-dimensional, weathered look.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Seated figure Headdress Glyph Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the range, the lot of you, and mind the dog, he's had his supper twice already. Now. You want to know why your great-uncle would not let the plough near the north field after the thaw. I'll tell you. It was January, the year the beck froze to the bottom, and the ground had been giving up stones for a hundred years the way a hen gives up eggs, never when you want them.

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That spring he found the big one, face down under the hedge bank, with a ring of little faces cut round its edge like the numbers on a clock. It took him sixteen days to work it free, and then he dragged it out on a sledge behind two oxen with the whole village watching from the gate. Somebody said it was a saint. Somebody else said it was the devil sitting on a stool. Your great-uncle said it was a counting stone, and he would not hear another word on it.

The figure in the middle sat cross-legged in a great square hat, looking down at his own knees as if he had mislaid something there. Round the ring were the days, or the years, or the bad seasons, and nobody could agree which. Each winter, when the frost came in hard, he would go out with a lantern and walk his thumb from one glyph to the next, muttering that the old fellow was waiting for the thaw to tell him when to stop.

The last winter he was alive, he came in with frost on his moustache and said the carving had moved. Nobody believed him. We walked out in the blue dark, and there was the lantern light resting on the lowest scroll, exactly where the ring's hand pointed. Thirty years of frost, your father says, and the stone has finally caught up with the calendar. Off to bed now, all of you, before the fire goes out.