Overhead view of tattooed forearms and hands holding a brush over a ceramic dish, with black blackwork patterns on the forearms and hand, surrounded by pots of pastel paint.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed hands painting ceramics from above

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

An overhead photograph of two arms with black geometric and tribal-style patterns covering the forearms and hands. One hand holds a brush and paints a small ceramic dish, surrounded by pots of pastel paint, brushes and glazed pottery. The palette is muted, with the black ink contrasting against the pale, mostly neutral tones of the surface.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Hand Hand Forearm Pattern Geometric pattern Paintbrush

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had taught me that a glaze tells the truth about a pot only after firing, so I should stop trying to read it while it was wet. The workshop at Saint Mildred's smelled of slaked clay and linseed, and the shelf above the sink held forty small pots of colour the community had mixed from ochre, copper and the pale chalk the river brought down each March.

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The commission came from the guesthouse in autumn: forty bowls for the refectory, each to carry a line from the Rule. Sister Oonagh, who ran the kiln, wanted them plain. I wanted the lines. For a month I painted the stepped zigzag my grandmother had cut into her bread board, a pattern that never quite closed, and each evening Anselm walked past the bench and said nothing at all.

On the night before the firing a storm washed the lane out under the wall, and a man came to the gate soaked to the bone with a cracked jug wrapped in sacking. He wanted it mended. I told him we only made things new. He left the jug on the step anyway, and when the rain eased I saw that its broken shoulder carried the same stepped line, worn almost smooth, as if someone had tried for years to get it right.

At dawn I opened the kiln. Thirty-nine bowls came out the colour of wet slate and sand. The fortieth had the zigzag, and where the line met the rim it had closed, which I had not meant to do. Anselm turned it over in his hands and said a pattern that never closes is only waiting. He set it on the refectory table with the others, and I understood that the work was no longer mine to finish.