Person seen from behind with black and grey tattoos covering the back, neck and both arms, including a winged figure on the back and a rose on the upper arm.

Heavily tattooed back and arms seen from behind

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless person sits turned away from the camera with one hand raised to their head and the other arm resting across a dark chair. Black and grey linework and shading cover the upper back, neck, and both arms, with a winged figure, a dagger, a rose and a script line on the neck among the designs. The plain white background keeps the focus on the tattoos, which are shown in soft, even natural light.

Traditional Back Upper arm Forearm Neck Wing Rose Dagger Script Figure Flower Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last Sunday train through Hartlow Junction was always late, and Mr Dunmore liked it that way. He kept the signal box window open even in February so he could hear the wagon wheels on the points and the river slapping the embankment below. The lamp is the only honest thing on this line, he told me, and he handed me his logbook the week his chest finally took him to the infirmary in Ruthven.

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The logbook was mostly times and wind speeds, but on the inside cover someone had pasted a rose cut from a seed catalogue, its petals gone the colour of weak tea. Beneath it, in his square capitals, were the names of people he had watched leave the platform and never seen come back. I read them by the stove while the brass angel above the waiting room door, its wings worn green by weather, creaked on its bracket every time the wind came off the water.

On the last page was one entry in a different hand, shaky, dated the morning he left. Lydia Marsh, 6.40 to Carlisle. Has not left the platform. Watch the knife in the drawer. I found the paper knife wrapped in a grey cloth, its blade dull with dust, and understood that he had been trying to tell me something about the girl who sat each Sunday on the bench under the angel with her case across her knees.

I went out at twenty to seven. She was still there, watching the empty track as though it might owe her something. I lifted the lamp and walked the length of the platform to tell her the train had been cancelled, which was true, and that the next one would come in the morning, which I hoped was also true.