Black and grey tattoo on the outer thigh of a dark-haired girl with a long plait, with small framed faces pinned across her body in a manga-style line drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl with pinned portrait panels on thigh

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the outer thigh, showing a dark-haired girl with a long plait and a blank expression. Small framed portraits of other faces are pinned across her head and torso, with clip details drawn at their tops. The bold outlines are filled with dense hatching and solid black areas, and the design fills most of the frame against a pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The prints came out of the dryer warm, still smelling of developer, and Maud pinned each one to the cork board behind the counter before the customer could ask for them back. Nobody on Ferrier Road ever asked. They came in with rolls from christenings and caravan holidays and dropped them off in yellow envelopes, and the lab kept the negatives in grey sleeves for a fortnight. Then the faces went up on the board, each held by a bulldog clip, as if someone had to keep watch over them.

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Maud was nineteen and had the summer job nobody wanted, mostly on the late rota, when the shutter was down and the only sound was the fridge humming over the chemicals. She had started out tidying, then sorting, then looking. A woman in a green mac who came in twice with the same bored toddler. A boy squinting at a birthday cake. Each of them clipped up, each with a little curl of paper at the top where the clip bit into the border.

On the last Thursday in August the envelope was from a man called Gerald Hollis, who had written his name in capitals and nothing else. Inside was one print of a girl about her own age in a school blouse, plait over one shoulder, looking straight through the lens as if she had been asked a question she would not answer. Maud held it under the lamp for a long time. Then she pinned it at the top of the board, above all the others, and switched the lights off.

In the morning the board was full again, though she had not printed anything new. The girl's face had been copied into every gap, each one a little older and a little more tired, and one at the bottom had its eyes shut. Maud rang the number on the envelope. It rang out to a recorded voice saying the line was no longer in use. She stood looking at the board for a while, then took a photograph of it, and the flash went off, and the girl's eyes shone back at her from every corner.

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