Black and grey realism style tattoo of a film reel with a looping strip of film on the top of a foot.

Film reel with looping ribbon on a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a film reel viewed face on, with five cut-out spokes and a central hub, with a strip of film trailing off it and forming a looping figure-eight shape. The linework is clean and the reel is shaded with soft grey gradients that give it a rounded, three-dimensional look. Only black and grey ink is used, and the design sits centrally on the top of a bare foot against a dark surface.

Realism Other Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third reel, lad, it sticks if you let the leader run out, and Mr Pryce will have your wages for a burned print. Sit on that crate, the one that doesn't wobble. There. Now I'll tell you about the summer the ribbon came off the spool.

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The Gaiety had five hundred seats and one Harrow-Dale projector that coughed like a wet dog, and I'd been up in that box since I was fifteen. Each reel had five cut-out spokes in its iron hub, so when the light went through them the back wall filled with little moons. One wet August a girl called Marjorie Teale climbed the iron stairs with a shoebox under her arm. Her brother had nicked a length of film from the cutting room and wanted it spliced into the newsreel, looped round like a figure of eight, so the pictures would never have to stop. I told her film doesn't work that way. She said it did at the pier end, where the old man kept his machine. She was eleven and had the stubbornness of a tide. So I did it, and I won't pretend I didn't like the look of it.

That Saturday the loop ran through the gate, the house went dark, and five hundred people watched a strip of harbour wall curl endlessly back on itself, the same three seconds again and again. Nobody complained. Mr Pryce came up at the interval, looked at the loop, looked at me, and said nothing at all, which was worse than shouting. The following week the splice was gone and the girl was gone too, packed off to an aunt in Scarborough.

The Gaiety shut in '68 and the projector went for scrap. I kept one length of that ribbon. Some nights, when the lights go down, I take it out and run it through my fingers, round and round, counting the turns the way she used to count the lamp posts on the front.