Black linework tattoo of an ornate multi-storey townhouse with arched windows and steps, shown on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate townhouse linework on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a tall, ornate townhouse with a pitched gable, rows of rectangular and arched windows, and a flight of steps at the base. It is drawn in clean black outline with no shading, and the detailing is picked out in fine lines. The building fills the forearm vertically, with a partial branch and leaves visible at the top edge of the frame.

Forearm House Building Window Branch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The executor wanted the house cleared by Friday, so I started with the windows, because you can always tell a family by how they dressed their windows. Mrs Ashdown's had nets on the lower sashes and nothing above, as if the upper floors were for weather rather than people. Eleven arched windows across the front. I counted them twice with a torch in my teeth while the rain came sideways off Hatherley Road.

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The steps were the hard part. Forty-one stone steps up from the pavement to the front door, and the middle nine had worn into shallow dishes, each one holding a little rainwater like a saucer. My nephew carried the sideboard down and cursed the banister, which was carved with fan shapes that caught every sleeve. Inside, the gable room still had wallpaper of climbing branches, and someone had pencilled heights on the doorframe, going up through the years.

On the last afternoon I found a ledger in the bureau. An entry every week for fifty-two years, all in the same hand: coal, bread, a new pair of shoes for the girl, and once, in the margin, 'steps scrubbed, bless them.' The final line was dated the week before she went into the home. It read simply, 'Left the lamp on in the top window.' I looked up. The top window was the arched one under the gable, and the glass there was still catching the last of the sun.

I wasn't going to be the one to switch it off. I went down the forty-one steps in the wet, left the lamp burning for her, and locked the door behind me.