Pencil and coloured pencil drawing of an ornate oval mirror frame with blue flowers, a shell, a star and pearl chains, shown as a tattoo design on a clipboard.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate mirror with flowers, shell and pearl chains

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design on white paper shows an ornate oval mirror frame with scrolled edges and a blank centre. Below it hang blue flowers, a blue oval gem, a shell, a yellow star and strings of pearls. The frame and shell are shaded in grey pencil, while the flowers and star use colour, giving a mixed tonal and colour composition.

Neo-trad Botanical Mirror Frame Flower Shell Star Pearl Gem Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mirror arrived in Saltcombe on the handcart that brought the lamplighter's wife home, though she was not in it. Mercy Pell was the only one on the quay willing to take it, and she paid for it with three pearls strung on cotton, which she could ill afford to lose.

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Its frame was black iron scrolled like a fern unrolling, with blue stones set at the top and a shell worked low down, the gilt worn to the bone. The glass in the middle had never been silvered. It was a clean oval of grey, and when she held a candle to it she saw only the candle. She hung it above her kettle anyway, and each night, after the last lamp went out, she tied a flower from her window box or a tin star she had cut herself to the chain beneath it, and the blankness began to fill.

First came the harbour, the boats knocking at their moorings, then the gulls on the breakwater. On the ninth night the lamplighter's wife stood on the quay with her lantern unlit, looking up at Mercy's window as if she had been waiting a long time to be seen. Mercy watched her lift one hand and say something the glass would not carry.

In the morning the lamplighter came to the door with his hat in his fists. Mercy took the mirror down and found the pearls at its foot were gone, and in their place a single ring lay in the clear oval of the glass, still warm as if someone had just slipped it off. She did not put it on. She carried it down to the quay and gave it back, and the glass stayed clean after that, showing only her own kitchen and the kettle on its hook.