Black silhouette tattoo of a person with tousled hair and a red stripe down the centre, on the inner forearm, above a white wristband and a beaded bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black silhouette portrait on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black silhouette of a person with tousled hair, shoulders and upper body, with the figure's features suggested by negative space and ragged edges. A single thin red vertical band runs down the middle of the design, and the lower edge fades into vertical streaks. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of a forearm with a white wristband and a multicoloured beaded bracelet at the wrist against a plain background.

Blackwork Forearm Silhouette Portrait Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the whistle goes at Hollin Pit you have already flattened your hair with water twice, and it springs back both times, the way it always did on your father's head. Mam says you look like him from behind. You have stopped minding. The lamp room smells of paraffin and wet wool, and Dai Crowther is shouting for someone to find the brass tally discs before the cage goes down.

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You take your tally from the board. The brass is warm from somebody else's hand. Outside, the headframe stands black against a sky the colour of cold porridge, and rain has run through the coal dust on the spoil heap, leaving long streaks down the slope. You learned to read that heap the way other boys learned their sums: where it slid, where it held, which way the wind would carry the smoke over the chapel roof.

Eleven hundred feet down, the men sing on the cage to keep their nerve, badly, and you join in on the second verse. Nobody in the village will tell you what happened on the north face last winter. They only say Wilf Ashby's boy is quiet now, and Mam keeps a red ribbon folded in the dresser drawer that she will not explain.

When the cage rings at the bottom you step out into the drift with your lamp swinging, and the dark closes behind you like a lid. Ahead, the seam shows gold where the light finds it. You put your palm flat against the coal and wait for the first knock from the far side, the one that means everyone is still there. Then you go on.