Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a cottage with a chimney and a tree inside an oval, set above a leafy wreath on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

House in an oval frame with leaf wreath

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-storey house with a chimney, arched front door and small windows sits within an oval frame, with a tree overhanging the top edge of the oval. A wreath of leaves curves beneath the house and the sky and roof are built up from fine stippled dots, while the outlines and leaves use solid black linework. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and is centred on the upper arm against a plain dark background.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm House Tree Leaves Wreath Chimney Door Oval

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Greaves kept the boarding house at the top of Calder Steps, and every spring she sent her son Tobias down to the harbour with a bucket of whitewash and instructions not to come back until the front door shone. He never argued. The house had been in the family since a ship's carpenter built it from salvaged timbers, and it had a way of settling its own difficulties if left alone long enough.

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The lodgers that summer were a cartographer who measured the stairs, a widow who paid in silver spoons, and a young man called Ned Harrow who came with one case and no name for the register. He slept in the room under the chimney stack. On the third night the stack began to hum, low, like a kettle thinking about it, and the oak tree at the bottom of the garden leaned its branches toward the glass as if listening too.

Tobias found the old tenant's ledger in the bread bin. Every boarder had signed it, and every name had a little leaf drawn beside it, pressed in ink. Ned's leaf was still wet. Mrs Greaves read the book by lamplight, then put it back and laid a sprig of bay on the sill of the room under the stack.

In the morning the house was still standing, the door still shone, and Ned Harrow had gone down the steps with his case, leaving the chimney quiet and the bay leaves curled green on the ledge. Mrs Greaves did not ask where he had gone. She only told Tobias to fetch the whitewash again, because the house always wanted its door done before the next one came up the hill.