Black and grey realism design of an ornate hand mirror framed with scrollwork, showing a castle through the glass with two roses, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate hand mirror with castle and roses

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an ornate hand mirror with a scrolled, filigree frame and handle. Inside the oval glass is a castle on a hill with tall spires, framed by pine trees and light rays. Two realistically shaded roses sit at the top right and lower left of the mirror.

Realism Mirror Castle Rose Tree Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Fenwick Girls' School reunion asked about the mirror, which was a relief, because I had no good answer. Pauline had pressed it into my hand in the cloakroom in 1987, the silver back gone dull, and told me to look in it properly before I went out. I laughed at her. She was always dramatic about the things she owned.

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Inside the oval glass there was no cloakroom at all. There was a castle on a hill, spires like sharpened pencils, pine trees stepping down the slope and light breaking through cloud in long pale bars. Pauline said it was the castle she had been drawing in the margins of double maths since the first year, and that whoever held the glass could walk up to its gate if they kept looking. I told her that was nonsense. She said a great deal was nonsense until you were forty.

Now the hall smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and a man I remembered as the boy who set fire to the bins was showing photographs of his grandchildren on a phone. I found a chair by the fire door and held the mirror on my knee. The castle was still there, the light a little brighter, as though someone had opened a shutter in the glass. Pauline's name was on the list with a small cross beside it, and nobody had mentioned that either.

I tilted the mirror towards the strip lights, and for a moment the gate in the picture stood open. I did not walk through it. I went back to the table, set the mirror face down beside the raffle tickets, and when I left at ten I picked it up again, because she would have wanted it looked after properly.