Black and white photo from behind of a person with hair in a bun, showing a symmetrical leafy botanical tattoo on the nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical leaf design on the nape

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Photograph taken from behind of a person with dark hair tied in a high bun and the sides and nape shaved away. A pale, symmetrical ornamental design with leaf-like motifs sits on the exposed nape, shown in fine grey lines and soft shading. The black and white image is framed against a grey knit top, with a thin chain necklace visible at the neck.

Botanical Neck Leaves Ornament Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold had been pointing the chisel at the same acanthus leaf for three days when his apprentice, Tess, held up the two hand mirrors and asked him which side was true. He snapped at her to hold them still. The leaf on the corbel above the north door of St Oswin's had to match its twin across the keystone exactly, every vein and notch, or the whole arch would look like a face with one eye closed.

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"It's only stone," she said. "Nobody stands behind it."

He had stood behind a great many things in his life, he thought, and most of them had been wrong. Still, he set the mirrors and worked the lines in reverse, the way his father had taught him, cutting the left leaf by reading the right one in the glass. It was slow. By dusk his hands ached and the dust had settled into the creases of his knuckles like pencil shading.

On the last morning the bishop's man came to look. He walked the length of the nave, paused under the arch and tilted his head. "Perfect," he said, then frowned. "Though I can't think why it feels so quiet back there." Harold said nothing. The leaves no one would ever see from the nave were the ones he had cut most carefully, and the stone did not care who was looking.

Tess found him at the door when the light went. "Shall I sweep the back?" she asked. He told her to leave it, and they walked out together into the close, the carved leaves behind them keeping their shape in the dark.