Black tattoo of a film strip with a dark silhouette and ink drips on a leg, surrounded by other black linework tattoos of a ship, birds and high heeled legs.

Film strip with ink splash on a calf

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black film strip with a figure silhouette and ink drips sits at the centre of the image, with outlined legs in heels above it. Other black linework tattoos show a ship, birds and a wave-like shape with dotted detail, while a feathery textured shape sits to the right. The image is entirely black ink on skin against a dark background, with the main tattoo well framed.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pryce ran the Marine Hotel on the front at Sandling Bay, and she kept the projector in the old ballroom because the guests wanted pictures on wet afternoons. Edie Vosper threaded the reels, and she did it with ink under her nails from the hectograph she used for the dinner menus.

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The trouble began on a Tuesday in August, when a bottle of Indian ink tipped over the splicing bench and ran across the last reel of a silent comedy. Edie rescued what she could. The dancer in the final scene, a girl in a short skirt and heels kicking against the lamplight, was now a black smudge with drips running off her hem, but the frames still moved. Nobody in the ballroom noticed except the boy from the chandler's shop, who sat in the front row every Tuesday and had never once looked at the screen.

A horn sounded from the harbour through the open shutter. That evening Edie carried the reel down to the quay, meaning to drop it in the tide, and found old Hale mending nets with two gulls perched on the rail beside him. He told her the sea lifted ink faster than any solvent in a chemist's bottle. So she held the film under the water until the black ran out of the sprocket holes and the girl came clean, arms wide, light showing through her.

Next morning Edie projected it again. The boy in the front row stood up when the dancer kicked, and clapped until Mrs Pryce told him to sit down.

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