Black and grey realism tattoo of the Madonna holding a sleeping child within a halo, with roses below, on an upper arm.

Madonna and child with roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper arm and part of the shoulder, showing a woman in a veil cradling a sleeping infant beneath a radiating halo inside a scalloped frame. Two shaded roses with leaves fill the lower left of the design. The work is entirely in black and grey, using fine stippling and smooth tonal gradients for the drapery, skin and petals.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Harrow went into the beech wood the week after Martinmas with a lantern in one hand and a twist of salt in the other, because her boy had coughed through three nights and the midwife had run out of things to try. Frost lay thick on the leaf litter. Past the old boundary stone the trees opened into a clearing where roses grew in the cold, pale and close-petalled, as though someone had drawn them with a fine nib on grey paper.

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A woman sat among them with a sleeping child against her chest. She wore a veil that fell to her shoulders, and a ring of light hung above her head like the halo a moon makes on a wet night. Agnes did not ask her name. She set the salt on the stone at the woman's feet and held out her own shawl. The woman looked at the shawl for a long time before she took it and wrapped the child in it, so that only his small pale hands showed at the edge.

She cut a rose from the bush with her thumbnail and gave it over with the stem bound in linen. "Hang it above the door," she said, in a voice like a dry leaf turning. "Let no one count the petals."

Agnes walked home without looking back, her lantern guttering. By the time the bells rang for Lauds the boy was breathing easily, and the rose hung above the door, green and perfect. Her neighbour Tom Pell came round that evening and, while Agnes was at the hearth, reached up and counted. Seven petals. By morning there were none, and the stem had gone grey as ash.

Every Martinmas since, Agnes has left salt on the boundary stone. By dawn it is always gone, and the lantern on her step is lit from inside.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.