Abstract black blackwork tattoo of flowing, smoky ink shapes running down the side of a torso over the ribs.

Abstract black ink design along the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless torso is shown from the side, with a tall, irregular abstract design running from the upper ribs down towards the waistband. The shapes look like spreading black ink or smoke, with sharp tapering tips, thin wisps and solid dark areas that fade into soft grey shading. The design is entirely black and grey and follows the curve of the body against a dim, blurred background.

Blackwork Ribs Abstract Ink splash Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the pass for nine days when the widow Agathe Lorne ran out of ink. She kept the inn at Carrow Gap, and her ledger was the only book in the valley anyone trusted, so when the last bottle went dry she sent her son down the road with a lamp and a list. He came back before dark with nothing but frost in his beard. The carrier had gone over the edge, he said, and the horse with him.

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That night a stranger knocked, a grey man with a satchel and no coat. He asked for a bed and paid in a coin with a hole through its middle. Agathe gave him the corner by the hearth, where the chimney drew badly and the smoke curled back into the room in long, slow ribbons. He sat with his hands open toward the fire and watched the smoke as if it were writing something he could almost read.

Near midnight the clock stopped, and the ledger on the counter began to bleed. Black ink welled from the spine, spread across the pages and crept over the wood like spilt night, sharp at the tips and thin as hair where it thinned. Agathe reached for a cloth and the stranger caught her wrist. 'It isn't yours to wipe,' he said. 'It's the debt. Every name you wrote down for nothing is coming due.'

She let the ink run. By morning the pages were black from edge to edge, but every name she had ever forgiven stood out clean and white, and the stranger was gone with the snow. The pass opened at noon. Agathe sent her son for ink, and when he asked why she needed so much, she said only that the old book was full now and she had a new one to start.