Fine line black tattoo of a mother and child embracing in profile, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mother and child profile line art on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a mother holding a young child close, drawn as a continuous single-weight black outline in profile. The linework is thin and smooth, with closed eyes and a hand resting on the child's head, and the figures are left unshaded. The design is entirely black ink on pale skin, with a grey fabric strap visible at the left edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud,

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The abbot has finally let me take the good quill from the scriptorium cupboard, so you may tell Mother I am not wasting the ink. All week I have tried to draw the Virgin for the margin of the Hale Psalter without lifting the nib once. Brother Ived says it cannot be done, that a line which never breaks is a lie, because nothing in the world is one thing from start to finish. He may be right. I have spoiled four sheets of vellum already, and the goatskin is costing us a fortune in penance.

Yesterday I watched the washerwoman from the lower village climb the hill with her boy on her hip. She stopped at the gate to shift him, and he reached up and laid his hand against her face. She bent her head down to meet it and shut her eyes, as though the whole road had gone quiet around them. I did not look long; it is not seemly. But I walked back to my cell with my fingers already tracing the curve of her back in the air.

The sheet that pleased me most is the one I drew with my eyes closed, the way Ived taught us to pray. The line went where the arm wanted to go, down the spine, round the small head, and came back up to the place it began without my deciding anything. Ived looked at it for a long while and said nothing. Then he said the abbot would hang it in the infirmary, where the mothers come to sit.

Tell Father I have not forgotten the sheep. I will be home at Candlemas if the snow allows.

Your brother, Anselm

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