Black and grey traditional tattoo of a large Victorian mansion with a tower and cross, on the inside of a forearm, above a banner reading The Devil.

Victorian mansion with tower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large multi-storey Victorian mansion with a central tower, topped by a cross, sits on a shaded ground area across the forearm. The building is drawn with bold black outlines and grey shading on windows, bays and chimneys, with a railing along the base. Above it, a banner with the words THE DEVIL is partly visible, and colour tattoos in red and yellow appear at the top and bottom edges of the frame.

Traditional Forearm House Tower Cross Building Banner Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell counted the railings twice before she let the carter unload her trunk, and both times there were thirty-one iron spikes along the front of Hollins Terrace. The agent had sworn there were thirty. He had also sworn the damp was a matter for the builder, and the builder had gone to Leeds.

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The house stood on its own patch of soot-grey ground, four storeys of bay windows and bracketed eaves, with a tower that rose above the roofline like a man clearing his throat. Someone had fixed a small iron cross to its spire. The cook, a stout woman called Bridie Hanratty, crossed herself each time she passed the foot of the stairs and said the cross was for the first owner, Thaddeus Marrow, a shipping man who had come home from Calcutta with a wife nobody saw and a crate nobody opened.

Ada did not believe in crates. She believed in the banister that rang when touched and the stain spreading across the tower ceiling. On the ninth night she climbed up for a lamp and found the tower window already lit from outside, a pale square on the ground below, where a tall figure stood beyond the railing counting the spikes on its fingers. When it reached the thirty-first it stopped, and looked up.

In the morning she sent a boy with a note to the agent asking him to read her the deed, every word. The reply came back in an envelope edged black: the thirty-first railing was a gate, bolted from the inside since 1861. Ada took a hammer out to the wet path, knocked the bolt loose, and stood back. Nobody came through. By dusk the gate had swung shut on its own, and she found she was counting again.