Realism tattoo of a bearded older man with flowing hair and swirling smoke across the back of a hand, shown in greys and browns against a pale background.

Bearded man portrait on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand carries a large portrait tattoo of an older bearded man with deep-set eyes, wavy hair and a full beard, with swirling cloud or smoke shapes around his head. The shading is soft and detailed, with fine hatching in the hair and beard and smooth tonal blending across the face. The ink is almost entirely brown and grey, and the hand is photographed against a pale, stained surface with dark red marks.

Realism Hand Portrait Hair Smoke Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's only half filled and I'll not waste oil on children who won't listen. You want the story of old Ezra Pryce, fireman at Penrhiw, the one the mountain kept. Everyone in the row knew him by the beard, grey as slag and twice as long, and by the way the coal smoke curled round his head whenever he stood at the pit mouth, as if the hill had decided to wear him like a hat.

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Ezra went down each morning before the cages, walking the galleries with his safety lamp held low, watching the flame for the blue cap that meant firedamp. He never trusted a canary to tell him anything when his own nose would do. Air, he told the boys, is a living thing that wants to go somewhere. You learn where it wants to go and you stand out of its road.

One February the fan at the top stopped with a shudder that rattled every window in the valley. The overman wanted the shift sent down regardless, because the coal was owed to a contract in Cardiff. Ezra stood in the lamp room with his hand flat on the cold door and said no. He said it so quietly the men leaned in to hear, and when they heard, they sat down on the benches and did not move. That morning the smoke above the headgear rose straight, then bent, coiling back on itself like something thinking.

The fan was mended by dinnertime. Ezra went down alone to check the roadways, and when he came up at dusk his lamp flame had sunk low and blue. He sat on the step grinning through his beard and said the mountain had only wanted to be asked. Nobody argued. When the old men say the smoke still forms a face above Penrhiw on cold mornings, that is only Ezra, looking to see who is still coming up.