Black and grey realism tattoo sleeve covering the upper arm and forearm, showing doves, a rose, a cross and praying hands among clouds and rays of light.

Doves, rose and praying hands arm sleeve

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A greyscale photograph of a full arm sleeve tattoo running from the shoulder down towards the wrist. The centre of the design shows a realistic rose and a stone-effect cross, with praying hands at the lower arm and two doves in flight above amid soft clouds and rays of light. The shading is smooth and detailed, with strong highlights and deep shadows across the forms, and the subject is cropped at the neck so no face is visible.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Dove Rose Cross Praying hands Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit nearer the grate, the snow takes the heat out of a room faster than it takes the sound, and I have a long while to talk before the pass is ploughed. Where was I? Ah, the rose. Everyone wants the rose in a tale like this. Everyone is wrong about the rose.

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Agnes Penhale carved the cross herself, the winter her husband went through the ice on Thornwick Mere. She cut it from grey chapel stone with a borrowed chisel and set it on the bank where he was last seen with his gloves in his teeth. The praying hands she sketched on the back of a tithe receipt, and she never let anyone tell her they were too big for the wrist. The rose she kept in a jar on the sill, a red one gone brown and papery, and she would not have it dusted.

In February the doves came, two of them, which was nonsense, because doves do not winter on the moor. The ostler swore they were the pair from the belfry and went off to fetch his ladder. Agnes only folded her hands over the bread and prayed until the candle guttered. Then the cloud over the mere split open and light came down in long pale bars, and out on the ice something cracked like a dropped plate, once, and then held.

They found no body that spring, and nobody asked Agnes to explain it. The jar is still on the sill of the Nag's Head at Thornwick. Ask for the window seat, and mind the petals, for they are the only thing in the house she never let anyone sweep.