Black and grey tattoo of an ornate oval frame enclosing a dark silhouette, on the inner forearm of a person holding an artichoke.

Ornate frame with dark silhouette on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person in a striped dress and cream top holds a green artichoke, with a tattoo visible on the forearm. The tattoo shows an ornate, scrolled oval frame enclosing a dark solid shape against a lighter inner panel. The linework is fine and the shading is soft grey on a plain light background.

Forearm Frame Cameo Silhouette Ornate frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry had been cancelled for three days, so the island had nothing to do but sit for its shadow. Ada Penhallow cut profiles in the back room of the chandlery, where the light came in grey off the harbour and the scissors never needed sharpening because she used them only on card. Lorna Vance, who kept the bakery, was her third sitter that morning, and she kept turning her head towards the window.

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"Hold still, Lorna, the mackerel boats are only boats." Ada cut the nose first, as her teacher had taught her, in one clean sweep, then the brow, the lip and the small hard bump of a chin. Lorna asked whether the frame would make her look grand. Ada said the frame made everyone look as though they had been expected. She pressed the black profile onto a cream panel and fitted it into the scrolled brass oval that had belonged to her mother, the one with acanthus curling at the corners.

Lorna took it home wrapped in brown paper. Ada swept the offcuts into the stove tin and found the sheet she had cut the night before, a profile she had not meant to make: a narrow jaw, a sailor's cap, the man who had gone out in February and never come back. She had cut him from memory, which she had promised herself she would never do.

She pinned the sheet to the wall beside the window, face out, and left it there. By morning the paper had curled at the edges from the damp, and the shadow had gone a little softer, the way shadows do when nobody is standing in front of them.