Black tower silhouette with a red sun, two birds, a small cloaked figure and a red rose tattooed on an upper arm.

Tower silhouette with red sun and rose on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large black silhouette of a tall, spiked tower sits on the upper arm, set against a red sun disc, with two small black birds flying beside it and a cloaked figure standing at its base. A red rose with a geometric, layered centre sits below the tower. The design uses solid black ink with flat red fills and fine white line detail on the tower, and it is photographed straight on against a plain black sleeve.

Upper arm Tower Sun Bird Figure Silhouette Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tower at Cinder Hollow had stood so long that the crows had stopped asking whose it was. Its black stone rose in broken spires, and every dusk the sun dropped behind it like a coin into a slot, red and round. The keeper's daughter, Ilse Varrow, climbed it each evening to ring the bell, because her father's knees had given out and nobody else in the valley would go past the ninth stair.

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One autumn a stranger in a grey cloak came up the road and asked after the rose that grew at the foot of the tower. No one had ever seen a rose there. "It grows where a promise was broken," he said, and he waited at the base with his hood down until Ilse came out to see him. She told him that nothing grew there but stone. He smiled and said he would wait until the bell rang.

She rang it. Two crows lifted from the spires and wheeled over the red disc. When she came down, the stranger had pushed a rose cutting into the gravel, and it was already opening, its petals folded tight like a sealed letter. "The tower keeps what it is given," he said. "Give it your own name and it will let you down again." She did not believe him, so she spoke her name to the stone. The stair groaned, and when she turned round the cloak was gone and only the rose remained.

Ilse kept the bell for forty years after that. The rose never withered, and on still evenings the crows come down to sit on the sill of the ninth stair, waiting for someone to ask their business. Nobody in the valley does. They are polite birds, and they have been waiting a long time.