Gold-brown line drawing of a crossed pickaxe and shovel with the numerals 1, 2, 8 and 0 placed around them, on a white background.

Crossed pickaxe and shovel with numerals

Colour · Flash

A crossed pickaxe and shovel are drawn in a bold, slightly distressed outline with textured shading on the shovel blade. The numerals 1, 2, 8 and 0 sit in the four open spaces around the crossed tools, which form a symmetrical composition on a plain white background.

Numeral Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the fire's warm enough and the fiddler's only pretending to tune. You want the story of the Saturday the floor sang? Then mind the loose board by the door, it's been loose since this was a chapel. The winding house at Harrow Gill had gone quiet after the cage stuck at the eighth level, and the four numbers painted on its gable were the only thing anybody could read in the lamplight. One at the top, two on the left, eight on the right, nought beneath. Nobody could agree whether it was a year or a pit number.

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Old Abel Rennick swung the pick at that face for thirty years, and he had a way of marking time with his boot. Two taps on the planking, a pause, then three. The men below had learnt it the same way, rapping their hammers on the iron rail. Nobody in this hall had thought about it since the mine was sealed, but when the fiddler struck up the waltz that night, the floor took up the old count without anybody asking it to. Three boots, two boots, the whole room stamping in time, and the iron answered back through the boards from a long way under.

Up the hill, the shovel men dug the spoil from the old adit with their bare hands, following the knocking through the rock. By midnight they had a line open, and a voice came up saying seven of them were alive and singing for their supper. Abel never said which tune they'd been humming down there, only that the fiddler had played it slower that night, on purpose, so the men could keep their breath.

Now, the board by the door. Every Saturday since, I've stood on it and felt it answer. Go on, stamp it once for me. There. Hear that? That's Harrow Gill saying good night.