Eight pencil and ink drawings of chest piece tattoo designs, including mandalas, lace, a tiger, scrollwork and swallows with roses.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chest piece design sketches collage

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A collage of eight pencil and ink drawings showing designs for chest or sternum pieces. The subjects include ornate mandalas, lace-style drapes with hanging drops, a tiger framed by flowers, scrollwork, and swallows among roses. The work is in black line with dotwork and stippled shading in some panels, on pale paper with no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Mandala Lace Butterfly Lotus Tiger Flower Scrollwork Swallow Rose Drop Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Oshen rose every spring, and every spring it took something. That year it took the nets, the reed boats and most of the flax, so Eshra the weaver sat in the lane with nothing to work but the blue hem of her mother's wedding cloth. She unpicked it stitch by stitch and wound the yarn round a fig stick until it was as thick as a wrist.

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In the dry month a tiger came down from the hills and lay under the mulberry trees by the well. The women barred their doors. Eshra did not bar hers. She sat at the edge of the shade with her loom across her knees and worked, and the tiger lifted its great head and watched her fingers the way a cat watches a moth. Swallows nested in the eaves above her. Whenever a loose end dropped into the dust they swooped down, took it in their beaks and carried it up to the roof-beam, until every nest was lined with blue.

When the tiger rose and walked back into the hills, it left a rose petal on the stones where it had lain, and a ring of lotus-leaf prints pressed into the dust. Eshra swept none of it away. The next spring the river rose as high as ever, but the nets she had mended held, and the boats came home heavy with fish. The women of Oshen came to her with their hems and their fathers' cloaks and asked for lace, with drops that would hang and swing when they walked.

She made it for all of them. She never once wove a tiger, though the young men asked her every year. The swallows still come back to the eaves at Oshen, and in the nests under the roof-beam the blue has faded to grey, but it is still there.