Healed blackwork tribal tattoo on the upper back beside the shoulder blade, with a small asterisk above and a line of small text below.

Bold tribal tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tribal design with thick, angular blackwork shapes and interlocking curves runs down from the upper back near the shoulder blade. A tiny asterisk sits above the design, and a short line of small text, reading I was 17 at the time, appears lower down on the skin. The ink is a single dark tone, with the solid shapes showing slightly softened edges, and the plain skin background keeps the focus on the linework.

Blackwork Back Tribal Abstract shape Asterisk Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry at Hollin Bridge stopped running the winter the river took the Pryce boy's cart, so the cattle had to be swum across at the ford. That is how Mrs Abel came to be standing knee-deep in brown water with a crook in one hand and a lantern in the other, arguing with the current as though it owed her money.

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Her husband had cut the river into the lintel of the chapel years before, a zigzag with a serpent looping through it, because he said water that could not be drawn had to be carved instead. Folk in Hollin liked to say the lintel was the only thing in the parish that never flooded. When the spring rains came that year the lintel stayed dry and the ford did not, and the men began to ask what the old carver had really been making.

Mrs Abel knew, but she was not saying. She took his knife down from the nail and cut a small star into the bark of the willow beside the ford, one mark for every beast brought over safe. The cattle kept crossing. At the seventh star she stopped, because the seventh beast had been her son's, and the water had taken him in April, and she had no more marks in her to make.

I was seventeen that spring, and I was the one holding the lantern. She put the knife in my hand and said the water does not read, lad, so cut the next one yourself. I did. The willow has since been felled, but the mark I made is still on the lintel, under the serpent, where he would have wanted it.