Colour tattoo of a castle under a full moon within a gold scrollwork frame, with a black and grey rose below it on the thigh.

Castle at night and grey rose on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A castle with turrets and lit windows sits under a large yellow moon and a starry blue night sky, framed by ornate gold scrollwork. Below it, a black and grey rose is shaded with soft greys and fine hatching on the petals and leaves. The colour panel fills the upper part of the composition, with the rose set beneath it on the same leg.

Neo-trad Traditional Thigh Castle Moon Night sky Star Frame Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate was barred at dusk, as it had been for three hundred years, so when the carter Ansel Crow came down the Dunmere road with a cart of wet salt fish and no lamp, the sentry on the ford wall told him to turn round. Ansel did not turn round. He sat on the box and waited for the moon, because his mother always said the moon over Garrowmere was the only honest light in the valley.

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It rose yellow over the turrets, and the castle woke. Every window along the gatehouse lit at once, and the stone hound that crouched on the bridge lifted its head and looked at him with eyes like wet slate. Ansel had heard the old tale: the castle let through anyone who could name the thing they had left on the far side. The sentry laughed when he said it aloud. The hound did not laugh.

Ansel named his brother, who had crossed to the south eleven winters before and never written. The hound shifted its weight, and a gap opened in the wall where no gap had been, and beyond it the road ran on with grass growing up through its cobbles. On the stone beside the gap, a grey rose had been trained over the wall by somebody's patient hand, its petals shaded soft as ash.

Ansel drove through. Behind him the gap closed, and the rose stayed where it was, pale in the moonlight, waiting for the next cart to come up the hill with a name in its mouth.