Bold black hand-drawn symbol tattoo on the neck behind a person's ear, with dark hair pulled up and black glasses visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black symbol tattoo behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view from behind of a person with dark hair pulled up, showing a small bold black symbol tattooed on the skin behind the ear. The symbol has thick, uneven strokes with a looped, curved shape that resembles a stylised letter or monogram. The image is in colour but the ink is solid black, and the soft warm background and vignette keep the focus on the tattoo.

Neck Symbol Monogram Hair Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mark had to be struck while the bronze was still soft, and Aldous Feathers never once let me do it myself. He kept the punch in a leather roll with the others, a looping shape like a figure three bent back on itself, and he said the loop was there so the bell would know which tower it belonged to. I was fourteen and thought him soft in the head for saying so.

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The winter the river froze hard enough to walk on, the foundry in Cold Harbour Lane had three bells owed to St Edith's before Candlemas. Aldous went down with a chest fever on the Tuesday, and on the Thursday I poured the third bell alone. The metal ran as orange as a fox through the sand, and when it had set and I drew the mould back, I took up his punch with my hands shaking like a drunk man's. The strike slipped. The loop closed into a blot, and the mark on the lip looked less like a monogram than a dropped ink-pot with a tail.

The vicar hung the bells on Candlemas morning and rang them across the ice, and the congregation came out onto the bank to hear. My bell's note was off, a sour crack under the others that the churchwarden said was a fault and wanted sending back. Aldous heard the news from his bed and sent word that the bell was to stay where it was. When I finally sat with him he only grinned through the cough and said, "Then it knows its own door now."

I still go past St Edith's on the way to the market. On a still day the blotted bell carries clear across the river, and I stand on the bridge and listen for the crack in it, the place where my hand gave way and the mark came out as my own.