Black and grey tattoo of a tall stone monument on a hill, with a dolmen, standing stone and church spire, across an upper arm.

Monument and dolmen landscape on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall obelisk-like monument stands on a stepped plinth at the centre, with a doorway at its base and wispy cloud bands above. Around it sit a dolmen, a standing stone, rocky outcrops, a stone wall and a church spire at the lower edge. The work uses fine outline with soft grey shading for the rock and sky, and the design is entirely black and grey.

Upper arm Tower Cloud Landscape Hill Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every lodger who came to Mrs Tregenza's in September asked about the tower on Carn Dhu before they asked about the bathwater. I gave them the answer my grandfather gave me: it was raised by a mason who could not stop counting. He had lost his brother off the Gull Rock in a March gale, and for nine years he hauled granite up the hill on a cart whose wheel squealed like a gull, one block a day, until he had counted out the number of days his brother had been alive.

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He built it stepped, the way the old people did, with a low door at the foot so a man could crawl in out of the wind. Inside there was only a ladder and the cold smell of lichen. The dolmen was already standing when he came, three uprights and a capstone, and he ate his bread under it every dinner hour, telling the stones the tides. The standing stone by the wall he never moved. The bell from Porthennis rang for his brother every Sunday, though he never once went down to hear it.

When my grandfather died, the key to that low door was found in his waistcoat, and nobody could say what it opened. I carried it up the hill on a grey morning in October, when the cloud lay along the top of the tower like a sheet left out in the rain. The door had no lock that I could find. I crouched and looked up the ladder, and a sound came down to me, a small bell shaking loose from a rope somewhere above.

I did not climb. I set the key on the top step where the wind could have it and walked back down past the church spire. Behind me the cloud split along the tower's crown like a letter being opened, and for the length of one breath I could read the shape of a name on the stone, though I have never learned whose it was.