Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Roses, playing cards and pocket watch design
Traditional · Black and grey · Flash
A black outline drawing on lined paper shows an ornate mirror or frame at the centre, with two roses, a pocket watch and playing cards arranged around it. The linework is bold and even, with no shading, so the design reads as a stencil-ready outline. The composition is balanced, with the roses at the lower left and upper right and the cards at the edges.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Now sit closer, because the wind up at Hollin Keep has ears, and it likes a story better when it has been told twice. There was a steward there called Oswin Marrat who kept the chapel keys on a ring and the castle's debts in his head. Every Michaelmas the lords came up from the valley to lose money at cards in the old solar, under a mirror so tarnished that a man could only see his own collar in it.
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One night a stranger sat down opposite him with a pocket watch laid on the table like a coin. The stranger wagered the watch against the keep's east gate. Oswin cut the deck himself, as was his right, and turned up an ace. The stranger turned up a three and laughed, because a three is nothing against an ace, and then he laid down an eight, and the room went quiet, because nobody had seen an eight beat an ace since the roof fell in.
Oswin lost the gate, the keys, and his own name, which the stranger took along with the watch. Some say the roses that grew through the fallen window that spring were red because they had drunk the spilt wine. Others say the mirror still holds a face that is not Oswin's, and that if you bring a key to it at midnight, it will open the gate.
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