Fine line outline of a gothic arched doorway with a curved inscription above it, tattooed on an upper arm with faint pale blue patches inside the arch.

Gothic arch outline on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A single-line outline of a gothic arched doorway with pointed arches, pinnacles and a band of script along the top curve, tattooed on the outer upper arm. The interior of the arch is left unfilled apart from faint pale blue patches, and the linework is thin and black. The tattoo fills most of the frame, with the arm angled slightly and a blurred background of a room.

Fine line Upper arm Arch Script Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stonemason's guild had sent me to Ostermere to finish the cathedral door, and I arrived with my mallet still wrapped in the cloth my mother had sewn. The old master had died in the winter with the arch half-drawn on the chapel wall, and the bishop wanted it done before the spring thaw brought the pilgrims. Nobody in the town could read the band of lettering that ran across the top curve, so I copied it letter by letter onto my own parchment and carried it about like a charm.

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The widow who kept the chapel key told me the arch had never been finished because the old master would not carve the inside. He said a doorway should show what it was going to hold, and until the bishop knew what that was, the stone would stay bare. I asked her what the bishop wanted held. She laughed and said that was the trouble with bishops.

I worked the pinnacles first, then the tracery of the window above, and when I came to the open panel between the pillars I found the wall already scoured pale and blue where the old master had tested his colours and wiped them away. I left it as he had. Each morning I stood in the cold nave with my hand flat against that empty stone, and each evening I wrote one more line of the lettering in the margin of my book. By midsummer I could read the whole of it. It was a single sentence, and it asked the reader to walk through.