Solid black silhouette tattoo of a dancer in a split leap with both arms raised, shown on bare skin.

Dancer silhouette in a split leap

Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a dancer mid-leap, with one leg extended forward and the other stretched back, and both arms raised overhead. The figure is filled with flat black ink and has no interior linework or shading, so its edges form the only detail. The pale skin around it is plain and unmarked, and the composition places the figure slightly off centre.

Dancer Silhouette Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule driver Tomas Ferreira stopped his cart at the well by Ninth Mile because the shadow on the road would not let him pass. It stood up out of the dust where nobody stood, one leg thrown out flat as a plank, both arms lifted to the sky, and it hung there while the sun went down behind the salt flats.

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The women at the water tank said it was the shadow of Ines Carrow, who had danced in the square at Dry Hollow the night the railway men came to town. She leapt so high under the lanterns that the crowd swore she did not come down. Her father sold her to the company's engineer that same winter, and she was taken east on the morning coach. Her shadow, the women said, had stayed behind to finish the dance, and it had been running the road ever since, always a little above the ground.

Tomas asked it plainly what it wanted. The shadow lowered one arm and pointed east, so he turned the mules and drove through the night, and the shadow ran ahead along the verge, never touching the sand. At Dry Hollow the square was empty and the boards had been swept. He found the engineer's house with its lamp burning, and in the window a woman's silhouette was bent over a sewing table, her hand still raised as though a tune had just ended.

Tomas told the engineer what he had seen. The man said nothing for a long time, then went outside and stood in the road. At dawn the shadow was gone from the verge, and the women at Ninth Mile still say that travellers who slow down near the well can see it flying just above the dust, waiting for someone to tell it that the dance is finished.