Four solid black silhouettes of figures in flight, arranged in a diagonal line along the side of a finger, shown on a hand with black nail polish.

Flying silhouettes along a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is held near the chin, with a small tattoo running along the side of one finger. The tattoo is four solid black silhouettes of figures, decreasing in size from top to bottom, as if drifting or flying in a line. The ink is pure black on pale skin, with a plain light background that keeps the focus on the finger.

Hand Silhouette Figure Flying Finger Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last sitter of the afternoon would not keep still, so Ruth Calloway tilted the lamp and let the wall do the work. She had cut four figures from black card that morning, the largest with its arms flung wide, the smallest no bigger than a thimble. The child wanted them in a line, each one a little further from the last, as if they were climbing a stair made of air.

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Her grandfather had built the lamp in 1911 for a boy above the chandler's on Church Street, who swore his shadow had slipped out of the window one night and never come back. Ruth had never believed a word of it. She believed in tin, brass hinges and the honest weight of card, and she told the child so while she worked, snipping the thin wings with the good scissors.

When the girl left, her mother's hand in hers, she forgot the cut-outs on the sill. Ruth pinned them to the cork board with the others and switched off the lamp. In the dark the room smelt of paste and cold ash, and the window was open a crack for the sea air.

Next morning the board held thirty-one silhouettes and not one was missing. Only the smallest had moved, pinned higher than she had left it, its edge caught in the draught and turned towards the gulls over the harbour. Ruth left it there. Some shapes, she had decided long ago, were better off without a pin.