Grey circular medallion tattoo with a face-like figure on a person's upper back, beside colourful beaded straps and an embellished garment.

Circular medallion tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close shot of a person's bare upper back showing a grey circular medallion tattoo with a stylised figure inside a decorative border. The linework is fine and the shading is soft grey, with a few small motifs around the outer edge. Blurred beaded straps and a multicoloured embellished waistband in the foreground add strong colour, while the tattoo itself is in black and grey.

Back Medallion Circle Figure Face Border Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, the lot of you, and mind the cat, for this is a winter story and winter stories want warm feet. My grandmother told it to me the year the Hallam ewes froze standing in the fold, and she swore every word of it, though she swore a good many things.

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In the hard month, when the ground rang like a bell under the spade, old Tobias Wren turned up a disc of dull metal in the frozen headland. Stamped leaves ran round the rim, and inside them was a face. Not a saint's face, not a king's. A woman's face with her hair drawn up and her eyes half closed, as if she were listening for something behind the wall. Tobias did what a sensible man does with a thing he cannot eat. He put it in his waistcoat pocket and said nothing to the parish.

That night the snow stopped. Not eased, stopped, the way a held breath stops. He went out to the fold with the lantern and found every lamb on its feet and steaming, and the disc in his pocket was warm as a new loaf. Each night after that, for as long as he kept it, the wind dropped at the same hour and the frost let go of the pump handle. Folk in Crane End said he had made a bargain with the ground. He said he had only made one with himself, to pass it on before the thaw.

The thaw came in March. Tobias buried the disc under the oak at the boundary, face down, so it could hear the earth and not the sky. My grandmother said the oak wept sap that spring and the ewes dropped twins. And if you walk out to the headland tonight, when the ground is hard enough to ring, you may still hear it turning over in the clay, asking which of us is listening now.