Two black and grey tattoos side by side: a realistic knife on the forearm with a woman's face shaded in the blade, and a neo-traditional style house in an oval frame with cherry blossom on the upper

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knife with a face and a house in an oval frame

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a split view of two tattoos. The left shows a realistic knife with a black handle running along the forearm, with a woman's eyes and lips shaded in the blade, using smooth grey gradients. The right shows a house with a pitched roof and bay windows inside an oval frame, with cherry blossom branches at the top and a cluster of blossoms and leaves at the lower right, drawn in bold black linework and grey shading.

Realism Botanical Forearm Upper arm Knife Woman Face House Cherry blossom Flower Leaves Oval frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knife came back from the forge on Skerra with a face in its steel, and Maud decided the smith had been careless with his quenching. She turned it under the kitchen lamp. The face belonged to nobody on the island, a woman with heavy-lidded eyes who seemed to be listening for a boat.

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Her mother had kept the house on the hill above the orchard for thirty years, the one with the crooked gable and the blossom trees that flowered three weeks before anything else on Skerra. Nobody went up there after the last Pryce died. The blossom still came, pink against the grey stone, and the ferry men said the trees bloomed for whoever was living in the house, which was no one.

On the night of the spring tide Maud climbed the path with the knife in her apron pocket. The door stood open. Inside, the rooms smelled of wet lime and old apples. In the front parlour the floorboards had been lifted in a neat square, and beneath them lay a row of tin boxes, each labelled in a hand she recognised from the ferry ledgers. Her mother's hand.

She closed the blade and set it on the windowsill, where the moon caught the steel. The woman in the blade looked back at her, lips shut, as if she had known all along what the boxes held and was not going to tell. Maud picked up the first box and began, carefully, to count the tins out loud, the way her mother used to count the fish, until the blossom outside shook loose its petals against the glass.