Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a Gothic cathedral facade with a rose window and spire on the forearm.

Gothic cathedral facade on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a Gothic cathedral front with two towers, a tall spire, a large rose window, pointed arches and a row of small decorative arcades. The outlines are crisp black lines, and dotwork stippling fills the shadows and the stone bands. The ink is black and grey only, and the design sits on the forearm with the sleeve of a striped top visible at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Forearm Spire Tower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You take the night porter's job at Harbour Court because the lobby has a round window above the bins that nobody else seems to look at. It is a rose of wired glass, its lead lines fanning out like the spokes of a wheel, and on your first shift the light through it lays a pattern across the lino that seems to shift each time the lift grinds up the shaft.

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Irene Pask, fourth floor, comes down every morning at six with a flask and a biro. She tells you the block is a cathedral that nobody finished. Her drawings are kept in a shoebox under the desk, dozens of them, each showing the building's front in black ink: two towers, stepped pointed arches on the balconies, and a round window in the middle that she draws again and again, pressing harder each time, until the paper tears.

The council letter arrives in March. Demolition, pending survey. Irene reads it at the desk, folds it into a small square and asks you to fetch the stepladder from the cleaners' cupboard. She climbs with a roll of masking tape and fixes her latest drawing over the rose from the inside, so the window becomes a pane of paper, and the morning light comes through it grey and soft.

The lift breaks the week after. You still come in every night. On the last evening before the vans arrive, you stand under her drawing and listen to water dripping somewhere in the stairwell, and you think of her counting arches while the building waits around her. You switch off the lobby light so the paper rose can glow on its own.