Black abstract band tattoo along the side of the ribs and hip, shown in a two-panel photo of a bare midriff with a navel piercing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black band tattoo along the side of the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A two-panel photograph of a bare midriff showing a row of bold black tattoo marks running along the side of the ribs toward the hip. The design uses thick solid shapes, dots and short bands in dark ink with no colour. The subject wears a white crop top and ripped denim jeans, and the framing is close and cropped to the torso.

Ribs Abstract pattern Dot Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyer's boy came through Hollin Fen the week after the flood, carrying a bundle of indigo cloth and a tin of black ink he would not let anyone touch. Nobody in the town could read his marks, so they called them the walking pattern, because he said each band was a mile and each dot a stile crossed on the way home.

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Mrs Ada Pell paid him a shilling to put the pattern on her daughter Nell, who was going into service at the Harrowby house, forty miles off across the moor. Nell held still on the kitchen table while he worked with a needle dipped in soot, and she did not cry, though Ada heard her counting under her breath. Three bands, then four dots, then a long band that ran round like a belt.

Nell wrote the first letter in March. She had found the big house cold and the cook unkind, but she had walked to the market town on her half day and counted the stiles, and every one matched a dot. Her mother read it aloud at the back door, then folded it and sat with the lamp, touching each mark on the paper with her thumb as if it were a rosary.

In November a letter came with no words in it, only a strip of paper pressed with black bands and dots, and a note in Nell's hand that read: I have started the walk. Ada laid the strip beside the tin on the kitchen table, took her shawl from the hook, and set out for the moor with the lamp, counting aloud.