Collage of five black tattoos in fine line and lettering, including a quote on the ribs, the number 9 3/4 on a wrist, a cat on the hip and a face on the forearm.

Five small black tattoos: quotes, a cat and a face

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

This collage shows five close photographs of black tattoos on skin. The subjects include a line drawing above a quote on the ribs, the numerals 9 and 3/4 on the inner wrist, a small cat sitting on the lower abdomen, a short phrase in typewriter-style lettering along the forearm, and a simple face drawing on the upper arm. The linework is fine and the tattoos are in black and grey ink, set against plain skin and neutral backgrounds.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Forearm Upper arm Other Quote Text Script Number Cat Face Line drawing Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo had painted the number on the wall of Cold Ashby station the summer the signalman's daughter ran off with a cellist, and he never let the paint dry without looking at it twice. Nine and three quarters. The Board had wanted nine, plain, the way every other platform in the county was numbered, but the old clerk said a platform that only sat between two others was no platform at all, merely a bit of gravel waiting to be walked on.

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So the sign went up at the wrong end of the bridge, where the fog came off the reservoir and swallowed anything under a yard. Passengers who had never been told about it found it by accident. A boy with a cricket bag once stood there for a whole timetable, and when the 4.12 pulled in he stepped straight through the gap between the carriage door and the platform edge, and was gone, with his bag still swinging on the gate.

Okonedo kept a ledger of such things. Eleven entries in forty years. Each one ended with the same note in his small, careful hand: returned on the Tuesday train, smelling of cut grass and not willing to say where.

The last entry was his own. He went through in the autumn, carrying nothing but a flask and a pencil, and the stationmaster found the ledger open on the bench with the pencil laid across the page. Underneath, in lettering so fine it was hard to read, he had written the one thing he never told anyone: the fog had a number of its own, and it was always the one you happened to be standing on.