Black and grey realistic tattoo on an upper arm showing a Mayan-style circular glyph ring around a carved face, with two seated figures below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mayan stone carving on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular ring of carved glyphs surrounds a central face or mask in relief, with two seated figures carved below it. The shading is black and grey, with heavy modelling that makes the carved stone look three-dimensional. The design fills the upper arm and is framed by a white shirt sleeve.

Realism Upper arm Glyph Face Figure Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had told the prior the stone was a millstone, and the prior, who had no wish to hear otherwise in the middle of the rains, let the matter rest. I knew better. I had scraped the moss from its face with a horn spatula for three evenings before the bell, and beneath it the carving came up like a drowned man rising: a ring of signs running round the rim, each one boxed and hooked like a fishing lure, and at the centre a face with its eyes half shut and a headdress stacked as high as a granary roof.

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Below the ring, set into the same grey basalt, two figures sat with their knees folded under them, facing each other across a gap no wider than a hand. Neither moved. Their hands were lifted, palms out, as if one were refusing a gift and the other were too proud to offer it twice. I drew them in my ledger that night, and in the morning I drew them again, and each time the lines came out a little more certain than I felt.

Brother Tomás came to the wall at Vespers and asked what I was doing with a stone that had nothing to do with the Gospel. I told him it was a calendar, which was true enough, and that the faces watched the sky, which I did not yet know. He laughed and said the Lord had put enough gods in these hills without us digging up the rest.

On the last night before the carters came for the lime, I climbed up with a lantern and traced the ring with my thumb, counting signs until the count came round to where I had started. Thirteen rings, or so I thought. The mask stared up at me with the calm of something that had already watched one monastery fall and was patient about the next. I left the stone where it lay, and I did not write down what I had counted.