Black and grey two-panel tattoo on an upper arm in an engraved style, showing scales and a solid polyhedron on the left and a skeleton holding an hourglass above a skull on the right.

Two-panel engraving tattoo on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a two-panel tattoo wrapped across an arm, photographed side by side. The left panel includes a set of scales, a solid polyhedron shaded with stippled dots, and a curved banner with lettering. The right panel shows a skeletal figure holding an hourglass above a skull, set against clouds and a dark landscape, with fine hatched linework throughout.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Scale Hourglass Skeleton Skull Cloud Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stair has lost two treads since the last frost, so you climb with the brass scales hooked over one wrist and the ledger tucked under your arm. At the top, the east tower has no roof left, only a square of white sky sitting on the walls like a lid that doesn't fit. Hanne has left the grey faceted stone on the sill again, the one she dragged out of the moat silt last spring. You pick it up. It is the only thing in the room that isn't cold.

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The steward wants a valuation before the thaw: every hearthstone, every oak door, every arrow in the armoury, reduced to a figure he can sell to the monks at Strand. You load the left pan with stones and the right with iron keys, and the beam will not settle. It leans toward the keys each time, as if they were heavier with something you cannot name. Down in the bailey somebody is hammering a cartwheel together, and the sound climbs the shaft of the tower in short, honest knocks.

Hanne says the sand in the glass runs whichever way you turn it, and you have never been able to tell her she is wrong. You turn it anyway and watch the last of the afternoon drain through the neck. You write the sum in the ledger, cross it out, then write nothing at all. Stone, key, cart, sister: none of them agree on a price.

When the light is nearly gone you set the grey stone in the left pan. The beam shivers and comes level for the first time all winter. You write one figure beside the castle's name, the weight of a single grey stone. The steward will not accept it. You keep the page anyway.