Fine line black tattoo of a numbered exposure scale, reading -2 to 2 with tick marks, on a forearm while the hand holds a toy camera.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Exposure scale tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a numbered scale with tick marks, reading -2, -1, 0, 1 and 2, sits on the forearm of a person wearing a grey jumper with teal stripes. The hand holds a colourful toy camera in front of a dark, softly blurred background. The linework is thin and the ink is solid black with no shading.

Fine line Forearm Number Camera

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Ivy used to say the pit was a camera that only ever took one picture, and you were in it whether you liked it or not. She'd say it with her thumb on the little brass dial of the light meter her father carried up from Durham, the one with its numbers running from minus two in the dark to plus two where the sun lived. Minus two was the cage at the bottom of the shaft. Zero was the pithead on a grey Monday. Plus two was the August the whole row went down to the sands at Seaton and nobody counted the cost.

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She had a plastic camera from the Woolworths in Ashington, the sort that made every picture a smear of pink and blue, and she carried it about like a lamp. The men thought it a daft thing. They went down with their helmets and came up grey, and the wedding photographs came out grey too, because whoever held the box had set the shutter by guess and hope.

The winter the lamps failed in the east drift, Ivy sat at the pit gate with that toy camera on her knee and waited for the cage. She set the dial to minus two, the way her father had taught her, and held the shutter open for a full minute while the men came up one by one into the yard light. When the print came back from the chemist in Morpeth, every face was there, sharp and warm at the edges, and none of them had been grey at all.

She pinned it above the stove in the front room. The numbers still run along the bottom edge in her neat hand, minus two, minus one, nought, one, two, so that anybody who looks can see how little light it takes to bring a person back up.