Traditional colour tattoo on the side of the ribs showing a green and grey helmet with a yellow visor, a rifle, two red roses and a red sunburst.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Helmet, rifle and roses on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo shows a green and grey helmet with a yellow visor at the centre, with a rifle crossing diagonally beneath it. Two red roses with green leaves sit at the top and bottom, and a red sunburst rises behind the helmet. Solid outlines and filled colour areas dominate, with grey shading on the helmet and rifle, and the composition is framed tightly on the side of the torso.

Traditional Ribs Helmet Rose Sunburst Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dai had the helmet on the kitchen table before the kettle boiled, turning it slowly so the window caught the chalky green paint and the yellow visor. A crack ran across the visor where a roof fall at the Eighteen had caught it in 1984. His father had worn it down that shaft for twenty-six years and would not let anyone else touch the lamp bracket.

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The rifle belonged to Ieuan. It had lived in the cupboard under the stairs since the spring he went off to Catterick, wrapped in an old blanket that smelt of Brasso and tobacco. Dai took it out, checked the bolt the way Ieuan had shown him at the Welfare range, and laid it beside the helmet. Their mother had grown the roses along the front wall, two red bushes that bloomed every June regardless of the rain, and Dai had cut the best of them that morning without asking anyone.

Gwen ran the parlour above the bookie's in Tonypandy, and she looked at the drawing for a long time before she asked him what it was meant to say. 'That he came back up every night,' Dai said. 'That the light was always the first thing you saw.' She sketched the sunburst first, the rays she said would hold the rest together.

When the needle started, Dai thought of the lamp coming up out of the dark at the end of a shift, one small yellow light bobbing towards the pithead, and how the whole street used to stand at its doors until it arrived.