Realistic coloured tattoo of a glowing arched doorway wrapped in thorny vines, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Glowing archway with thorny vines on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo shows an arched doorway with a bright light beam falling through it onto a blue and white chequered floor. The arch is framed by curling, spiked vines and sits on cracked stone-like shading that gives a three-dimensional effect. The palette is mainly blues, greys and tan, with gold tones in the vines, and the design fills the upper arm and shoulder area.

Realism Upper arm Vine Thorn Stone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the draught from the cloister door, because that door has opinions. Brother Anselm kept the key to it for forty winters, and he never once opened it on a Tuesday, which is the first thing you should know about him. The second is that the abbey bell rang by itself the night the thorn hedge grew through the north arch, and nobody had planted a thing in that yard since the flood.

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Anselm went out with a lantern and a bread knife, which tells you how seriously he took the matter. The vines had wound up the stone and spiked every hinge, curling round the arch as if they were holding it shut from the inside. Behind them the wall should have been plain brick. Instead there was a hall beyond, floored in blue and white squares that ran off like a chessboard laid out by a giant, and down the middle fell a shaft of light so thick he could have leaned on it.

He stood there until the lantern guttered. Then he cut one thorn, just one, and the whole arch sighed open. The monks say he walked the chequered floor for the length of a psalm and came back with his beard singed white at the tips and his hands full of gold-tipped leaves that never wilted. He would not say what he had seen. He only said the light had asked him which square he was standing on, and he had not known.

So when the bell rings at odd hours, we do not go to the north arch. We ring back, we keep a bread knife on the sill, and we pray the vines stay polite.