Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a raised fist and a kneeling figure inside a laurel wreath, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raised fist and kneeling figure in laurel wreath

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a raised fist on a long arm rises above a kneeling figure, both enclosed in an open wreath of leaves. The shapes are filled with flat black ink with minimal fine detail, and the leaves are rendered as sharp black cut-outs. The design is shown in black and grey on pale skin, centred within the frame.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Silhouette Laurel wreath Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the stair down under Marrowgate gaol has forty-one treads, and the thirty-second is a liar. Wren Haddow counted them every morning the winter she mended the gaoler's bell, so she knew the kneeling man in the lowest cell by the sound of his chain before she ever saw his face.

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He had been a salt-boatman from Sedge Bay who said the tax on eels was theft, and he said it loud, in the market, within the king's hearing. For that he knelt on the flags with his hands bound, every day, praying for a pardon that never came. Wren brought him the heel of her bread and a cup of thin ale, and each morning he asked her the same thing: has the bell rung yet? She told him no, because it had not. The clapper was cracked, and the gaoler wanted it silent.

On the last day of frost the bell rang anyway. Nobody could say how. Some said Wren had filed the crack with her own teeth, some said the wind had got into the tower, and some said the king had dreamed of it and woke afraid. The sound rolled over the marsh like a dropped tray of pewter. The gate men looked up, the boatman got to his feet with his chain raised in his fist, and the whole town of Marrowgate, which had been kneeling for thirty years, got up with him.

The laurel crown the old men wear at the Feast of Sedge was woven that spring from the hedge by the gaol gate, and Wren cut the leaves herself. The king was never found. The bell has rung true ever since. My grandmother swore the boatman went on to become a king himself, which is what they all say when the fen is cold and they want a better ending.