Spider web tattoo design being drawn in marker
Black and grey · Flash
A hand holds a marker and draws a spider web design on white paper, building it from sharp, tapered curved lines radiating from a centre. The strokes vary in thickness and taper to fine points, giving a bold, graphic look. The design is entirely in black and grey tones, set against a plain white background with a brown edge visible at the left.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Brother Anselm had told me twice that the scriptorium window was no place for a novice with a pen, yet every morning I found him at the sill, watching the spider work in the gap between the glass and the lead. "She draws faster than you do, Edwin," he said, not looking round. "Look how she tapers each thread so the wind can't catch it."
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I had been set to copy the Rule of St Benedict in a hand fine enough to satisfy the prior, and my strokes kept fattening at their ends like a farmer's thumb. Anselm said the trick was to lift the nib before the line gave up its ink, to let each curve finish in a point. So I practised on scrap vellum, drawing spokes out from a single dot, each arm bowing and thinning until it was no more than a hair. By Lent I could make a web that a sceptic might mistake for thorns.
The prior found the sheet pinned under my psalter and held it to the light. He said nothing for a long while. Then he asked whether the spider had been given leave to build there, and I said I did not know, and he laughed for the first time that year, a dry sound like a page turning.
That evening Anselm swept the sill clean with the side of his hand and left the web in the corner, where the light could still reach it. "Some things are better drawn than kept," he said, and went down to vespers without another word.
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