Black dotwork tattoo of a classical bust with a labyrinth on its head, on the upper arm, with a small tombstone reading TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG above it.

Classical bust with labyrinth on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A classical marble-style bust with curled hair sits on the upper arm, its head opened to reveal a circular labyrinth. The shading uses fine dotwork stipple on the face and hair combined with bold black outlines. The design is black ink only and is centred on the arm, with a small tombstone tattoo reading TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG above it against a plain pink background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found the gap under my awning by ten o'clock, and it was pooling in the cardboard box where I kept the plaster heads. Most of them were cheap: Caesars with chipped noses, a Venus nobody wanted, a boy with no ears. The bust Mr Ashdown left me was different. He sold it to me for a fiver on the condition that I never sold it on, and he said it would tell me when it was ready to go. I thought that was the sort of thing old men say to make a sale feel like a sacrament.

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Ashdown had been a plasterer in Halifax before his hands went, and he told me the story in the back of the van while his wife pretended not to listen. His brother had gone to sea one March and never written. So over the following winter he sat with a dental pick and a magnifying glass and pricked dots into the face until it looked like frost had settled on it. Then he cut the labyrinth into the skull, a spiral of corridors so fine you needed to squint. 'For the thoughts I didn't want to finish,' he said, and then he laughed, because it sounded daft out loud.

On Saturday a woman in a yellow mac asked what I wanted for it. I said it wasn't for sale, which was true, and she left a card with her number on it. When the stall was quiet I ran a wet thumb along the maze until I reached the middle, where the stone was hollow. Inside was a brass key no longer than my little finger and a strip of paper folded small. The paper said, in pencil, *Left at the end, the sea is the other way.*

I set the bust in the front window facing the street, the key on its marble tongue. By evening the rain had found the dots and ran down the cheeks in a hundred tiny beads, so the old face seemed to be weeping quietly at the traffic. I left the sign up anyway: NOT FOR SALE, in my own careful capitals.

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