Black and white photo of a solid black sound wave line tattoo on the side of a raised arm, across the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black sound wave line tattoo on the side torso

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo of a wavy line with three peaks runs horizontally across the skin. The thick, solid linework has a slightly textured edge and no shading. The photograph is black and white, with the raised arm framing the upper edge and the tattoo centred in the lower half.

Ribs Line Zigzag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Board wanted the foghorn silenced by Lady Day, and Dilys Crane would not let its last voice go unrecorded. She borrowed the Tanfield reel-to-reel from the schoolhouse, wrapped it in a feed sack against the sleet, and walked the cliff path to Carrick Ness with her boots full of February. The keeper's cottage smelt of paraffin and wet wool. Nobody had lit the lamp in a fortnight, but the diaphragm still sat in its brass housing like a sleeping animal.

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She set the microphone on the sill of the fog signal room and waited for a thick morning. When the sea went the colour of pewter she pressed record, and the horn gave its usual three blasts, long and low, each one lifting the green eye of the tape meter into a peak and dropping it back again. Three humps, then a gap, then three more. Her husband Ewan used to say the horn was the only thing on the coast that told the truth in a straight line, and she had never understood him until she watched that needle walk along the scale.

The Board's man came up on the Thursday to see the machinery shut down. He stood in the cold room with his hat in his hands and listened to the reel play back through the little speaker, the blasts rolling out over the bare boards, and he asked her to stop it before the end. She didn't. She let the tape run to the hiss of blank leader, spooled it back and handed him the reel. 'Count them,' she said. He counted three, then three again, and by the third set he had stopped looking at his watch.

Dilys kept a copy. Every February since, when the fog comes in off the firth, she plays it in the kitchen with the back door open, and the sea answers from the rocks, three long notes, a pause, three more.