Gothic castle on an upper arm
Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo
A large gothic castle with tall spires, arched windows and a turret runs down the upper arm, drawn in black linework. Stippled dotwork shading gives the stone walls and roofs soft grey tone, with small yellow and red accents in the windows. A blue crescent moon sits above the design, and a few small stars appear beside the base.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The stonemason's widow sent me out to Harrow Skerry with a bag of chisels and a letter nobody on the mainland would read aloud. The castle had been half built for forty years. Its spires pointed at a sky that never settled on weather, and the builders had abandoned the north tower when the quarry flooded.
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Only one man lived there, old Ansel Vey, who kept a lamp burning in the single finished window, a pane of red glass his father had set. He said the castle was built for the moon. I thought him mad until my first night on the spiral stair, when I found a sill cut to the exact curve of a crescent, worn smooth by hands that had measured it every month for decades.
We worked through the winter. I laid the arches while he counted the stars that showed through the unroofed nave, and on every clear night he marked one on the wall in yellow chalk. When I asked why, he said a building needs a record of what it has seen, or it forgets it was ever meant to stand.
In March the boat came early, and Ansel's chair was empty by the window. On the north tower, where we had never finished the stone, someone had laid a single course of new blocks overnight and set a crescent into the keystone. I climbed up with my chisel and cut one more star beside it, small enough that only the moon would find it.
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