Black script lettering reading Highlife across the side of the ribs, with a hand holding a rolled cigarette beside it.

Highlife script tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of black script lettering reading Highlife across smooth skin on the side of the torso. The letters have fine, tapered strokes with some shading along the downstrokes, and the word slopes diagonally from upper left to lower right. A hand holding a rolled cigarette with an ash tip sits at the lower left, and a thin necklace with a heart pendant hangs at the right against a dark blue background.

Lettering Ribs Script Word Heart Necklace Cigarette Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Calder House had been broken since March, so every evening I climbed nineteen flights with Mrs Okafor's shopping bags knocking against my shins. Nobody on the estate called the top floor anything but the Highlife. Dev's dad had named it years ago, when he was young and the view from the landing window still looked like money. You could see the gasworks, the ring road, the lit windows of the new flats going up across the river, and on clear nights a thin grey stripe of sea.

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Mrs Okafor lived on the nineteenth herself. She paid me in Jaffa Cakes and stories about a dance hall in Lagos where her husband once spun her under a paper moon. Her hands shook when she poured the tea, so I did it for her. On Thursdays her son Tunde came round to fix the bulbs, then stood on the balcony with the door propped open, rolling his cigarettes on the windowsill and tapping the ash into a jam jar she pretended not to notice.

The week the council finally fixed the lift, she died in her sleep. The men from the funeral home carried her down in the new lift, which chimed at every floor as if it was sorry. I stood on the landing with the empty bags and copied the word onto the inside of my wrist in biro, the way she used to write her shopping lists, careful and joined up, every letter leaning towards the window.

That Thursday Tunde asked if I wanted the jar. I said no. He tipped the ash over the railing anyway, and we watched it drift down past nineteen floors of kitchen lights, and neither of us said the name out loud. Behind us the lift hummed up past the landing, empty, going nowhere in particular.