Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a house split down the middle, with shaded windows and a tiled roof, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Split house on a lower leg

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a house drawn in two halves, with the left and right sides slightly offset along a vertical line. Bold black outlines define the pitched roofs, windows, a tiled band, a stone-look base and a set of steps, with shading built up from dense dots and hatching. The image is black and grey, shot close up on a lower leg against a pale, blurred background.

Blackwork Dotwork Calf House Window

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Calloway had carried the lamp up the steps for three winters before anyone in Skerry Bay asked why she bothered, since the two houses on the Dunnet slipway had not spoken since the year the herring failed. Her grandfather and his brother had raised the place together from one stack of Norway pine, one roof and one chimney shared down the middle. When they fell out over a net they both claimed, they took a saw to the ridge, cut from eave to footing, and each dragged his half onto his own patch of shingle. The sea wind did the rest. The halves settled a hand's width out of true, so the windows of one looked slightly past the other, and the stone footing never lined up again.

Keep reading

Every evening Ruth lit the lamp in the left window, the side that had been her grandfather's, then climbed the wooden steps on the right to hang the spare by the door. Her mother said it was foolishness. The men mending nets on the wall said nothing, but they watched her go up and come down, and they watched the lamp burn in the window that faced the other house until the oil ran out.

In the gale of that February the boats that were out did not come back until the tide had turned twice. Ruth stood on the top step with the lamp held high, shouting into the spray until her voice broke, and the brothers' grandsons came running up the slipway with rope and the spare plank from the boat shed. They laid it across the gap between the two halves at the top of the steps and lashed it with tarred cord, and when the first boat came scraping in under the wall, its crew walked straight across the boards from one house to the other.

Nobody agreed to anything after that. The plank stayed where it was, and by spring a pot of geraniums sat on it, half on each side, tilted towards whichever window had the better light.