Black and grey drawing of a symmetrical ornamental filigree design with hanging drop motifs, shown on textured paper.

Symmetrical filigree design with hanging drops

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical ornamental design drawn in pencil or graphite on textured paper, with a central medallion surrounded by scrolling filigree and leaf-like forms. Thin dangling drops hang along the lower edge, with a larger pendant at the centre. The shading is black and grey, with light highlights giving the scrollwork a raised, three-dimensional look, and the design fills the frame horizontally.

Ornament Filigree Scrollwork Medallion Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The silversmith on Skerra had only one thing the old women trusted him for, and that was the thinness of his wire. He could draw silver out until it was finer than a horsehair and still make it hold a curl. So when the fishermen's widows came up the cliff path with their dead husbands' chains, he took the metal and gave back lace.

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The year the tide stopped coming in properly, a stranger in a grey coat asked him for a collar. For the harbour, he said, which had swallowed three boats and wanted something to hold it still. Oswin Tarrant did not believe in harbours with appetites, but he believed in payment, and the coin was heavy. He worked through the dark months with the shutter closed, bending scrolls into leaves, pinning a medallion at the centre where the wire crossed like the bars of a gate, and at the bottom he hung seven drops, each one a bead of silver so small it trembled when he breathed.

When the collar was done, the stranger lifted it by its clasp and turned it to the lamp. The shadows fell through the scrolls and laid a second pattern on the floor, a mirror of the first, bright where the highlights caught. "You've made it hold," he said, and dropped the coin into the forge bucket where it hissed. Then he was gone, and the tide came in that night as high as the church step, and in the morning the boats came home one by one, every one of them, riding low with the weight of their catch.

Oswin kept the shutter open after that. Every spring he sold his lace to whoever asked, and he never once let the drops touch the water. They were the last thing he made each year, and each year he counted them: seven, with the centre one heavier than the rest, and nothing ever came up the cliff path asking for the chains back.