Blackwork tattoo of a gothic cathedral skyline with tall spires covering both feet and toes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gothic cathedral skyline across both feet

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A dense gothic city skyline of cathedrals, spires and domed towers is tattooed across the tops of both feet and onto the toes. The linework is bold and solid, with fine hatching in the spires and arched windows picked out in negative space. The image is shown in black ink on pale skin against a plain light background.

Blackwork Other Spire City skyline Tower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the river crossing of Ostrel, the toll-master's daughter Ilse counted the day's coins each evening, and each evening the coins came up short. The bridge joined two kingdoms that had not spoken since the flood, and the guards searched every cart and every pair of boots. Anything could be smuggled across the Ostrel except a thing too big to fit in a pocket, and the guards had long ago stopped looking for those.

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Tobiah came over in the autumn with a satchel of chisels and no papers. He said he was a mason from a town that had drowned on the far side, and that he was walking home to see whether its cathedral still stood above the water. The guards laughed and told him to sit on the rail. So he sat there every night, drawing spires in the damp sand with the point of a chisel, and Ilse, who was supposed to be counting, watched him draw.

By the first frost the spires had come up through the customs-house floorboards. Nobody saw them grow. One morning there was a point of grey stone pushing through the clerk's desk, and by the next there was a whole nave under the bench where the guards played cards. The toll-master offered Tobiah money to leave. Tobiah asked only that the drowned people on the far bank be let across, one at a time, each with a bell in their hand, and the guards agreed because they could not step over the towers.

On the last night Ilse counted the coins and found them all there, whole and bright. Beyond the bridge, on the mud of the far bank, a small city of spires stood in the moonlight, its domes doubled in the river. The bells had begun to ring, very faintly, and she could not tell whether they were calling the dead home or the living out.