Black ink ankh with a heart-shaped loop on the left ribs of a person wearing a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ankh and heart on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink ankh runs vertically down the side of the ribcage, with a curled heart-like loop and a small spiral above its loop. The linework is solid and uniform, with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the torso, with a white top bunched above it and low-rise denim visible below.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the pump at Hollin Farm before Christmas, and by the first week of January the water came up brown and then not at all. Old Maud Terrell said the well had gone quiet because nobody had thanked it. Her son Tom laughed and went out with the bucket anyway.

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He found the well cover iced over and a loop of cord hanging from the handle, knotted into a shape he didn't know. Beneath the ice, when he cracked it with the axe, lay a key the length of his hand, with a cross-bar at the bottom and a loop at the top like a heart turned on its side. Beside it was a curl of copper wire, wound tight, as if someone had coiled a spring and let it rest.

He carried the key up to the house. Maud turned it over under the lamp and said her own grandmother had carried one just like it, that it opened the thing a farm cannot do without, which is the next season. She told him to hang it on the byre door and keep it dry. The next morning the pump ran clear and warm for the first time in a month, and the ice in the yard had melted into a neat ring around the well.

Tom hung the key on a nail above the byre door. Every winter after that he walked out before dawn, rattled the iron loop against the wood, and went to fill the bucket, and the water never failed him again. He never asked what the spiral was for. Maud said it was the part that kept the key turning.

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