Black and grey traditional style tattoos stacked down a man's upper arm: a burning car, a tombstone reading THE SYSTEM IS A DEAD END, a globe and a hand with a dollar sign.

Burning car, tombstone, globe and hand on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stack of four flat, bold black-ink motifs runs down the upper arm: a burning car, a tombstone with the words THE SYSTEM IS A DEAD END, a globe showing a continent in solid black, and an open hand with a dollar sign on the palm. The linework is thick and uniform with minimal shading, and the outlines are clean. The image is black and white, and the tattoos are set against bare skin with a plain grey wall behind.

Traditional Upper arm Car Flame Tombstone Text Globe Hand Dollar sign Continent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dai Pritchard had the manager's car keys in his fist when the last whistle went at Glanrhos, and he stood in the empty bay watching the lamp-room men walk out past him without once looking at the Rover.

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Ruth watched from the bus shelter with her gran's umbrella furled across her knees, though the sky over the tips had been clean all week. She saw her uncle unscrew the cap from the petrol can they used for the welfare hall mower, slop it over the bonnet, and strike the match on his boot. The flames went up the paint like something that had been waiting its whole life to climb.

Nobody rang the fire brigade. The notices about the shaft closing had been pinned up in the Working Men's Club since March, and the village had been holding its breath ever since, waiting for someone to let it out. Emlyn Price, who had cut headstones for the pit families for forty years, came up the hill three days later with a slate slab on his barrow and a chisel in his coat pocket. He would not say who had paid for it. He carved the words slowly, one letter at a time, while Ruth sat on the wall and counted the letters back to him under her breath. When he finished he wiped the dust off with his sleeve and said the stone wasn't for anyone dead. It was for whoever came up the valley next, looking for work and finding a sign.

That evening Dai came round to the house with his hands in his pockets, and when he took them out his palm was open and empty, the thin pale line where the wage packet had been. He held it up to the streetlamp so she could see. Behind the terraces the old tips were turning silver under the moon, and somewhere beyond them the world went on turning too, the same size and shape it had always been, which was the trouble with it.