Black linework tattoo of a stylised horned figure with a web-like pattern of swirls and hatching on the inner upper arm.

Horned figure outline on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised figure with a curled, horn-like head and a reclining or bent body is outlined in black ink. The interior is filled with fine web-like hatching, swirls and cross-lines rather than solid shading. The tattoo is black ink only, shown on pale skin against a dark background with a green fabric edge at the top.

Upper arm Figure Swirl Hatching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum taught me to lace before she taught me to cook, and the first pattern she ever made me copy was a ram that had lain down in the middle of a cobweb. She called it Tupper's Ram, after a Welsh farmer who'd drawn it on the back of a feed bill, and she never told me why he'd lain down in a web. I stitched it a hundred times on handkerchiefs before I was allowed near anything that mattered.

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So when Priya asked me for a veil for her wedding in Hebden Bridge, I knew which pattern she'd want without her saying it. She didn't want the ram. She wanted the cobweb, with the curled horns worked into the border like a question mark. I spent eleven weeks on it at the kitchen table, tea going cold, my fingers blue from the bobbin pins.

On the morning of the ceremony the vicar's wife found a hole, a single dropped stitch right over the horn, and I nearly cried. Priya laughed and said the ram had always been a bit of a trickster. She pinned the veil on herself and walked up the aisle with the gap sitting above her left ear like a window.

Afterwards, at the back of the village hall, Tupper's grandson came over with a plate of sausage rolls and asked whether I'd heard the old story, the one about the ram who let the spiders keep his horns clean. I said no. He said the mending is the part people remember. I looked at the hole and found I already knew.