Small black and grey blackwork tattoo of a castle silhouette with horizontal stripes and a faint circle behind it, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle silhouette on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small castle silhouette with several spires and a central arch sits on the skin. The castle is filled with horizontal black stripes of varying thickness, and a faint circular outline is visible behind it. The ink is black on pale skin, against a soft grey background, with the tattoo placed near the centre of the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Castle Spire Stripe Circle Silhouette

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You take the porter's lift at three because the stairs have been locked since the autumn flood, and it smells of bleach and somebody's cold toast. Ward Seven is quiet except for the drip pumps ticking like a clock that has forgotten the hour. In bed four, Mrs Abernethy is awake and asking for her castle again.

Keep reading

It is a drawing she made in 1962 on the back of a ration book: a keep with five spires, a gate shaped like a half moon, and stripes across the stone that she says are the shadows the sun leaves through the portcullis. The original was lost in a house move. You have a biro in your breast pocket and a stack of obs charts, so you turn one over and begin with the tallest spire, the way she tells you to.

She watches the pen the way a surgeon watches a scalpel. When you finish, she shakes her head. The arch is too high, she says; it should sit low, the way the door did on the morning she married. You redraw it while her dry hand rests over yours on the sheet. Beyond the glass, frost forms on the car park window in a faint ring, as though someone has traced a moon there from outside.

At six the day staff arrive and you find the drawing folded into her locker, the arch now lower, a daisy sticker on one corner. Underneath, in careful capitals and blue ink, she has written THE GATE IS OPEN. You read it twice before you go home, and carry it out with you like a ticket.