Collage of four photos of fine line skyline tattoos on a foot, an upper arm and a forearm, one showing London's Big Ben and London Eye in black and grey.

City skyline tattoos on foot and arms

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows four tattoos of city skylines. The top left and middle left images are single-line outlines on a foot and an upper arm, and the bottom left is a red outline skyline on an arm with the script 'it can't rain forever' beneath it. The large right image shows a black silhouette of London with Big Ben, the London Eye and other buildings, softened by a grey blurred reflection along the bottom of the arm.

Fine line Other Upper arm Forearm Skyline City Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's gone soft like a bad loaf. Sit where the tar's still warm. I'd been lighterman on this reach since the year the big clock got its new hands, and the river never once gave me a dry shift. Thick as gravy in August, it was, and smelling of everything the city had flushed down the day before.

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That Tuesday a man stood on Westminster stairs with a drawing board under his arm, pencilling the towers against the sky, the clock face, the wheel of the eye turning slow over the water. He was drawing the city upside down, he told me, because the river showed it truer than the sky ever did. I laughed at him. Then I rowed him out to the middle where the current pulls, and he set the board on his knees and asked me to hold still while he got the reflection right.

Hold still, I said, I'm a lighterman, I've never held still in my life. But I did. The silhouette came down out of the grey and into the water, Big Ben stood on its head, and the wheel spun under us like a coin somebody had dropped and forgotten. His ink bled where the drips ran down from the rooftops, and he swore at it, and then he stopped swearing and just watched.

When we came back to the stairs he rolled up the board and gave me the drawing. I still have it, folded in the tin with my wages. Every time it rains on this reach I take it out and look at the bottom, where the towers melt into the water, and I think the city is only half of itself on land. The rest of it waits underneath, patient as a dog at a door.