Five girls in dresses on the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Five standing girls in short dresses are shown in a row, with their faces left blank. The four on the left are drawn in thin black outline with no shading, while the figure on the right is filled in solid black. The skin is warm-toned and the photo is taken outdoors, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Fine line Back Girl Figure Silhouette Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had folded the sugar paper into accordion pleats so that six girls would come out holding hands, but the scissors slipped on the fifth fold, and when she opened it up there were only four, pale and joined at the elbows, plus a stray scrap that had been cut through and fallen to the rug. Her brother Tom said it was rubbish. Her mother said to tape it straight and be done.

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Nell did not tape it. She took the black felt-tip from the biscuit tin and coloured the spare figure in until it was solid, the way a night looks through a window when the lamp is on. Then she stood it at the end of the row, a little apart, one hand at its collar as if checking for a button that was no longer there.

Through the following week the four pale girls waited with their paper dresses at the bus stop on the hill road, where the wind came up off the pass and flicked the pages of the timetable. Tom tried to knock the black one over with a biro. It rocked and stood up again, because Nell had glued a folded strip of card under its feet. "It's not for playing with," she said. "It's the one that stays."

Tom stopped asking after that. When the family drove up the pass at the end of the summer, the windows fogged with everyone's breath, and Nell held the paper row flat on her knee. The black figure had slid to the edge of the page, but its hand was still raised to its collar, and when the bus crested the bend and the valley opened below them, she thought it looked back down the hill the way they had come.