Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate oval scrollwork frame

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is an open oval frame made of symmetrical acanthus-style scrolls and leaf flourishes, with a point at the top and bottom centre. The linework is bold and dark, and the scrolls are filled with soft grey shading that gives them depth. The design sits centrally in the photo against pale skin, with a dark garment visible along the bottom edge.

Traditional Back Frame Scrollwork Oval Flourish Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame was finished somewhere off Finisterre, and I still had the gouge in my hand when Mrs Ashby came down to the stores to ask whether it would be ready before we raised Southampton. I told her the scrolls were cut and the leaves were curling the way I wanted, but the oval had to stay open until the painter in Vigo sent his sketch. She looked at the empty ring of carved wood as if it were already a face, then went back up the companionway without another word.

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I worked it in the lamp room because that was the only place the wind could not reach the shavings. Honduras mahogany, pale as bread at first. I cut each acanthus scroll with a bent gouge, then rubbed lamp-black into the hollows with a rag so the curls would stand out from the flat of the frame when the light came through the porthole. The top point and the bottom point I left sharp, because a sharp point holds the eye. Every evening the swell lifted my stool and I had to brace a knee against the bench to keep the cut true.

Then the glass in the saloon broke in the gale off Ushant, and the purser sent the frame down for repair. It came back to me with a split along one scroll and a dent where a trunk had struck it. I glued the split, pinned it, and sat with it on my lap until the ship stopped groaning. The sea had made the frame look older than the day I cut it, and that suited it.

The painter's sketch never came. When we docked, the purser hung the frame in the smoking room with nothing inside it, and the first man who stood before it leaned close and saw his own face framed in the oval, grey and unfinished, like a pencil study waiting for its colour. I went home that week and did not carve another thing for a year.