Pencil and ink sketch of an ornate oval mirror frame with scrolled borders and hanging drops, shaded with a pale green wash in the centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate oval mirror frame design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn sketch of an ornate oval mirror frame, with elaborate scrolls, curls and beaded detailing around the border. Fine black linework defines the frame, with small areas of shading along the inner edges and a pale mint wash filling the oval centre. The design is drawn centrally on textured paper and reads as a tattoo design sheet.

Mirror Frame Ornate frame Scrollwork Sketch Oval

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass came off the boat at Sanday with its back full of sea salt, wrapped in a sheet that had once been white. Mrs Easdale sent me down to the harbour shed to fetch it because I was the only one of us who could lift a thing without complaining. I carried it up the brae against my hip like a sleeping child, and the frame knocked my knee every third step, all those curls and beads biting at me.

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The frame had been carved for a parlour that no longer stood. Someone had gilded it once; flecks of gold still sat in the hollows of the scrolls, and the beading along the rim was worn to pale little moons by hands that polished it on Saturdays. The glass was clouded, the colour of a wave held up to the light. When I wiped it with a damp cloth, a face rose through the grey, not mine, a woman with her hair pinned and the look of someone about to say no.

I hung it in the back room where the peat smoke never reached. Each evening I cleaned it, and each evening the woman grew a little clearer, until she was looking past my shoulder at the window and the sea, as if waiting for a boat to come round the point. Mrs Easdale said the Kirkness women had always watched the water like that, and that the glass had been sent home to be kept, not to be seen.

On the Thursday the boat came in early with nobody on it. I went to the back room and found the glass turned to the wall, which I had not done. When I turned it round, the woman was gone and the oval was only water, moving slowly, as though something beneath it had just let go. I hung it back on its nail. Some things on this island want to be looked at, and some want to be left facing the wall.