Bold black block lettering reading WAL, a star, then MART across the lower back, above jeans and a brown belt.

Bold block lettering across lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a person's lower back showing the words WAL and MART in heavy black block capitals, with a black star between them. The letters are solid black fill with no shading, and the edges are clean. The image is in black and grey, with blue jeans and a brown leather belt at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Back Text Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire's gone to ash and the last bus has rattled off past the canal. My grandmother used to tell this one about a night watchman called Ivo Penhallow, who minded the stockroom of a discount warehouse on the edge of Cressley Ring. The sign over its car park had a star set between two halves of its name, and the lights could be seen from the motorway a mile off, like a ship that never got to harbour.

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One February, the power failed across the whole estate at midnight. Ivo lit his lantern and walked the aisles between towers of boxed kettles and bagged compost, and he found the steel doors at the back standing open a crack, with no one on the other side. He stood there a long while, counting his breaths, and then he heard someone humming a hymn out in the car park, a tune his mother used to sing over the washing.

He went out with the lantern. There was nobody. Only a single trolley, its wheels turning slow in the wind, pushed up against the flagpole, and a paper star stuck to its handle, the kind the children made at the Christmas fair. Ivo pulled it free and found his own name written on the back in pencil, in a hand he had not seen since he was nine.

He kept that star in his top pocket for the rest of his days. Every shift after, he left the back door on the latch, just in case somebody needed to come in out of the dark.