Black widow spider tattoo with a red hourglass marking on the side of a woman's neck, with blonde hair pulled back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black widow spider on the neck

Neck · Mixed · Photo

A black widow spider is tattooed on the side of the neck, shown from a three-quarter angle with its legs spread across the skin. The linework is bold and black, with solid black areas and soft shading on the body, and a small red hourglass marking on the abdomen. The close crop shows the neck and part of a hand raised to the hair, with a light background.

Neck Spider Hourglass Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, you, and mind the kettle, because this is the bit where my father always stopped and wouldn't say another word until somebody had paid him in tea. Up on Carrick Vane there was a lamp room with a brass rail round it, and the rail was polished every morning by a keeper called Hesketh Lowe, who had hands like two boiled ropes and never once in thirty years touched the glass without his cloth.

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The black widow came up in the supply crate with the paraffin, the winter the boat didn't come for eleven weeks. Nobody saw her go in. Hesketh found her on the lens housing one grey morning, sitting in the middle of her own dark web like a bead of soot, and on the underside of her belly, where you'd only look if you were fool enough to look, a red mark shaped like an hourglass, a small red sand-clock with its neck pinched tight.

He did not kill her. He said so often enough that the men in the Padstow pub stopped believing him. He counted her sand instead. Each evening, when he climbed to light the wick, he tapped the glass once with his knuckle and told her how many nights were left until the relief boat, and each night he moved the count a little nearer the bottom of her red glass, though she never seemed to notice she was being counted at all.

The boat came in the eleventh week. Hesketh went down the rock with his bag, and when the new keeper climbed up to the lamp room he found a cloth folded neatly on the brass rail, and beside it a single thread of spider silk, bright as a hair, running out through the open window towards the mainland.