Black filigree scrollwork fills a Mickey Mouse head outline, with a coloured red rose at the centre, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Filigree Mickey head with rose

Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a Mickey Mouse head silhouette outlined in bold black ink. The ears and face are filled with ornate black scrollwork, and a red rose with green leaves and stem sits at the centre. The rose is shaded in pink and red while the scrollwork is black, set against a plain cream background.

Mickey mouse Rose Scrollwork Filigree Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit nearer the stove, because this is a story about iron, and iron is cold in the way that gets into your knuckles. My grandad Ezra kept the forge behind the chapel in Hollin Bridge, and in the spring of 1953 the vicar's wife came in with a drawing on the back of a seed catalogue. Round ears, a round face, and a rose standing in the middle of it all. She wanted a gate for her garden, she said, that looked like something pleased to see you.

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Grandad said no. Scrollwork that fine, he told her, takes a month and a steadier hand than his, and her husband had spent the last of the parish money on the chapel roof. But she left the drawing on the bench anyway, and every evening after the last heat he'd pick it up, turn it over, and squint at it under the lamp. By April he had the first curl bent.

He worked the ears first, because the ears were the easy part, and then the face, which took the whole of May. Every scroll had to close on itself without a gap, or the rain would find it and the iron would bloom with rust by the autumn. The rose he would not forge. He cut it from a sheet of copper his brother had sent up from the mines, hammered it soft over a sandbag, and riveted it to the centre so it would catch the light and never darken.

The gate was finished in June. The vicar's wife never came to collect it. She had gone to her sister's in Carlisle with a bad chest, and the drawing stayed on the bench under a jar of nails. So Grandad hung the gate on his own shed, facing the lane, and said the rose was for whoever came walking past and needed a bit of warmth in the middle of all that black. Go on, look. The copper's still bright, see? Nobody in Hollin Bridge has had the nerve to touch it.