Black and white photo of a fine line city skyline tattoo with small stars on the left side of a bare torso, above the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

City skyline and stars on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bare torso in black and white shows a single-line city skyline with tall spires and a few small stars above it. The linework is thin and unshaded, drawn as one continuous outline with no fill. The composition places the tattoo low on the side of the torso, with soft grey shading across the skin.

Fine line Ribs Skyline City Star Building Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been at the market since Tuesday, and Maud Ferrier was tired of counting her coins in it. She sold thread from a tin box under the awning of the fish hall, and most days the thread was the only thing on the stall that stayed dry.

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One grey afternoon a stranger in a wet cap asked for a length of black thread. She cut it for him and he paid with a copper that was warm from his pocket. Then he took the butcher's bill from her hand, turned it over, and drew on the back of it with a stub of pencil. He did not lift the point. The line went up and down like the roofs of the town: the cathedral spire, the mill chimney, the castle wall, the bridge with its three arches. Above them he set three small stars. "Never lift the pencil," he said. "A line lifted is a street lost." Then he was gone into the crowd, and she laughed at the drawing, and she did not throw it away.

The town went on as towns do. Maud kept the bill folded in her apron and took it out in dry weather to look at the stars. When the river rose in the wet year and the low streets flooded to the sills, the old men said nothing had been lost, because the drawing hung in the fish hall and nobody had lifted the pencil from it. Maud grew old at the stall. The thread got dearer.

In the last autumn of her trading, the man in the wet cap came back under the same awning. He was slower now and the cap was new. He asked if she still had the bill. She unfolded it on the wet wood, and the rain ran off the edge of the awning onto the paper, and the line held, black and unbroken, the spires standing over the water with the three stars above them.