Pencil sketch of a neo-traditional tattoo design showing a castle in a beaded oval frame, surrounded by roses and the words Beauty Lies Within.

Castle and roses in an oval frame

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design shows a castle with spires and flags inside a beaded oval frame, with a sun and lightning-style lines in the sky behind it. Three roses in outline sit around the base of the frame, with leaves trailing down to the left. Looping script lettering reading Beauty Lies Within arcs across the top, and the whole piece is shown in grey linework on paper with no colour.

Neo-trad Botanical Lettering Castle Rose Leaves Oval frame Sun Lightning Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother had the glass wrapped in a shawl the day the carter came, and she would not let me unwrap it until the road was behind us. It was an oval thing with a beaded rim, the sort gentry hang in halls, and when I lifted the shawl at the crossroads there was a castle inside it, its spires stuck with little flags, a sun low over the battlements and a crack of lightning running up the sky like a stitch pulled tight.

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The carter swore the glass had come from the house at Harrowgate, where the old lord lived with his hounds and his bad temper, and that nobody who looked into it for long came out the same. Mother said that was carter's talk. She had been looking into it every night since my father died, and she was no different that I could see, only thinner.

So I took it to the lord's house myself, a girl of fourteen with a sack of onions for the kitchen as cover. The gate was open and the roses on the wall had been let go wild, their heads drooping as if they were listening. Inside, the lord sat with his back to the window. "Show me what you've brought," he said, without turning round. I held the glass up so the only thing he could see in it was his own ear and the grey light behind him.

"Tell me what's in it," he said. "A castle," I said. "The gate's open and there's nobody at the door." He was quiet so long the onions began to sweat in the sack. Then he said he had waited twenty years for someone to tell him that, and he got up, and the chair scraped the flagstones, and the roses outside the window stood up straight as if they had been told.