Brown linework design on a forearm showing a standing figure beside a tall cylindrical object and three small round creatures, with spirals, a star and tally marks on the hand.

Figure and creatures on a forearm with hand spirals

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A standing figure holds a tall cylindrical object with ridged bands, flanked by three small round creatures with ears on the forearm. The hand carries a cluster of concentric spirals, a small star and several tally marks. The linework is shaded in brown and grey tones with no bright colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quarrie had been counting the days on the back of her hand since the rain came in sideways and stayed. Seven strokes made a gate, and she had four gates by the time the three grey creatures came up the cliff path, rolling like dropped pebbles and humming through their noses.

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They were not hungry, they said, only lost in the wrong century. One had a crack in its left ear. Another could sing the tide tables. The smallest kept touching the brass cylinder that stood in the middle of the scullery floor, the tall ridged thing old Mr Harrow had left behind when he went down to the harbour and did not come back up.

Mabel had been told never to turn it. Harrow's note, pinned under the tin of tea, said the spirals on the cylinder were a map of the stairs, and that each turn of the bands took you one step round the castle's bones, which was the wrong direction for anybody who wanted to get out.

On the fifth morning she turned it anyway. The creatures sighed, the marks on her hand blurred like wet ink, and the sea outside went flat as a plate. The castle, which had been ruined for three hundred years, put its roof back on for the length of one breath. Then it let the roof fall again, and Mabel found herself standing in the yard with her palm open, and the spiral there had grown one ring larger.

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