Small traditional style tattoo of a cluster of houses inside a scalloped oval frame on the inner upper arm.

Houses in a scalloped oval on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A cluster of houses and chimneys fills a small oval frame with a scalloped, lace-like border. The linework is bold and black, with the roofs and some walls shaded in muted red-brown and the remaining walls left as light skin tone. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a plain grey background, with a white garment with a black pattern at the left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me the peel, love, and mind the flour on the sill. Before the milk cart and before the bells, Thornbury Row was black from end to end except for this one window, and that was me, up to my wrists in dough like a fool who couldn't sleep.

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Across the cobbles stood the four houses everybody called the Sisters, two of them leaning on the other two, their chimneys all smoking at once because coal was cheap that winter. Gerald Pim lived in the one with the crooked gable. Every morning he came over with a shilling for a loaf he'd eaten the week before, and every morning I told him to keep it, because a man who pays his debts early is hiding something.

Then one morning the chimneys stayed cold. I carried over a warm cob and found his door open and the kettle dead on the hob. On the table sat a brass oval with a lace edge, the Sisters painted inside it in red and cream by his late wife, the only picture he'd ever kept. He had left it for me with a shilling tucked underneath.

The Sisters came down for flats years back, and the glass in my window has cracked twice since. Still, I hang that oval on the nail by the oven each winter, and when the first light comes up red over the roofs inside it, I say good morning to Gerald's chimney and cut the first loaf.

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