Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing a hand mirror with the script 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', framed by a rose, beads and scrollwork.

Mirror, rose and 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded hand mirror sits at the centre of this design, with the words 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' written across its surface in cursive script. A line-drawn rose, a string of beads and ornate filigree scrollwork frame the mirror and extend down the arm. The piece is rendered in black and grey, with soft shading on the mirror glass and bold outlines elsewhere.

Neo-trad Lettering Upper arm Mirror Rose Bead Scrollwork Quote Script Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall mirror at Seafield Terrace had been losing its silver since the spring, black specks blooming at the corners like mould on bread, and Mrs Pruett would not hear of it being replaced. 'It shows the guests as they are,' she said, which Dorothy, who had kept the ledgers for three seasons, understood to be a joke only half intended. Every morning Dorothy ran a cloth over the oval glass and its rose-and-bead frame, bought from a junk stall in Whitby by a husband nobody mentioned, and every morning the reflection came back a little more ghosted.

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The lodger in room four, a Mr Anselm Greave who paid in advance and in coins, stopped in front of it on his way out to the pier. He looked for a long time. 'Your mirror is kinder than you are, Mrs Pruett,' he said, and the landlady laughed too loudly, the way she laughed at the price of coal. Dorothy caught his face in the spotted glass, softened and blurred at the edges, and thought he looked almost handsome.

That evening she found a hand mirror from the dressing table wrapped in brown paper on her bed, the silver back scratched with a nail. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There was no name. The hand was Mrs Pruett's, Dorothy was nearly certain, the same looping hand that had written her wages into the ledger every Friday since June.

She carried it down to the hall and held it up against the dusk coming through the fanlight, turning it until the words ran backwards across her own cheek. Then she went to the mirror on the wall, the spotted one, and looked for a long time, and found that she could not tell which of the two glasses was lying.