Black line drawing of an ornate oval frame with scrolling acanthus leaves and lace-like filigree, held on paper by a hand with dark nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate oval frame design

Black and grey · Flash

A hand holds a sheet of paper showing a black line drawing of an ornate oval frame. The frame is decorated with scrolls, acanthus-style leaves, a crest at the top and lace-like patterning at the top and bottom. The linework is bold and even, and the centre of the frame is left blank.

Ornate frame Oval frame Scrollwork Acanthus Lace Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame came off the east wall in March, the week the last of the roof gave way. Mr Pellow, the solicitor who held the keys, wanted it crated and sold with the silver, so he sent me up the hill with a tin of brushes, a bottle of white spirit and instructions to take the moss out of the lace before anyone saw it.

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The lace was the worst of it. Ivy had grown through the carving at the foot of the oval until the leaves looked as though they were being pulled down into the stone. I worked at it with a cocktail stick for three days, and on the third the ivy came away with a sliver of gilt, and under it someone had scratched a name into the wood: Hester, 1791. Nothing else. The centre was bare board, grey and clean, as if a portrait had been lifted out long ago and nobody had bothered to say who it showed.

I should have packed it. Instead I carried it into the great hall, propped it against the window arch where the roof was open, and sat down with my flask. Rain came in sideways. Clouds slid across the gap and the light went gold, then grey, then gold again, pouring through the empty oval onto the flagstones. Pellow rang that evening asking for the invoice. I told him the frame was still in the hall and that I would be a while.

I have been back every morning since. The gilt is nearly clean now. Some days I think I should go home and paint something to fill the middle, a woman in grey silk with a dog at her feet, but each time I lift the brush the sky comes through the frame, and I put it down again.