Black and grey photograph of a woman in a black dress and garter stockings, with a rose and an ornate frame tattoo on her thigh and a sleeve on her left arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and ornate frame on a thigh

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman in a fitted black dress and garter stockings, cropped below the face. A shaded rose and an ornate frame design sit on the upper thigh, and a detailed sleeve with snake or tentacle-like forms runs down the left arm. The image is monochrome, with soft studio lighting and a plain pale background.

Upper arm Forearm Thigh Rose Snake Tentacle Ornate frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had sold the frame three times and bought it back twice, which the pawnbroker on Scotland Road found remarkable, since it held nothing but a dried rose the colour of old claret and a square of silvered glass that showed the room behind it.

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Her son Tom, who mended clocks for a living, said the glass was a cheat. Each night he polished the gilt scrolls with a rag, and each morning the rose seemed to have leaned a little further towards the window, as if it wanted the light more than the wall. Ada had grown up in Whitby among the fishermen's wives, and she knew what it meant when a thing kept its own counsel. You did not argue with it. You set a saucer of milk by the hearth and you kept your shoes by the door.

In November an ironmonger's boy brought a coil of brass chain wrapped in oilcloth, the links fine and lapped like a serpent's back. Tom had ordered it for a gate that was never going to be hung. Ada looped it three times around the frame's corners, pulled it snug, and locked it with the little key she kept on her string of beads.

That night the rose was still in its place, and the glass was still silver. But when Tom came down before the kettle, the lamp in the reflection had been lit, and a second cup sat steaming on the table in the glass, beside the empty chair that was not in the room at all.