Black and grey realism tattoo of two winged cherubs kissing, across a man's chest.

Kissing cherubs across a chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of two winged cherubs, one kissing the cheek of the other, with a soft-focus background and wings extending to the sides. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey gradients on the skin and fine modelling on the faces, hair and wings. The image is black and grey and is composed centrally on the chest, with a mirrored reflection shown in the lower part of the frame.

Realism Chest Cherub Angel Wing Kiss Child Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The left-hand cherub had lost its nose in a fire in 1862, and Mrs Ellery wanted it back by Saturday. I was nineteen, the plasterer's boy, and I spent that week on my knees in the cold chancel of St Oswin's, mixing lime putty in a bucket that smelled of wet dog and old prayers.

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The pair had been carved by a man nobody in the parish remembered, two round-faced children in shallow relief, one bent to press his mouth against the other's cheek. Mrs Ellery's late husband had taken a cast of them before the fire, and the plaster mould sat in a crate under the vestry stairs, grey with dust. When I finally lifted the lid I found a folded paper pressed into the rim, the ink faded to the colour of weak tea. It was a list of names in a child's careful capitals, and beside the last one someone had drawn a small heart with a crooked arrow through it.

I asked Mrs Ellery who the names belonged to. She read them standing, one hand on the pew, and said they were the children of the mason who had carved the screen. Four had died in the winter of 1841. The boy who was left, she said, had cut his brothers and sister into stone twice, once for the church and once for himself, and the kiss on the cheek was the only thing he had ever been able to give the one who went first.

I did not fill the cheek. When the cast came out of the mould that Saturday, the kiss was sharp and clean as the day it was cut, and Mrs Ellery paid me an extra shilling and asked me to leave the rest of the chancel as I found it.