Black outline lightning bolt tattoo on the side of a torso, partly covered by clear wrap being peeled back by a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lightning bolt on the side of the torso

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small lightning bolt tattoo on the side of a bare torso, above the waistband of a patterned skirt. The bolt is drawn as a simple black outline with a plain, unshaded interior. The skin is covered by clear wrap that a hand with pink nails is peeling away, suggesting the tattoo is freshly done.

Ribs Lightning bolt Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire came in at ten past four on the afternoon the cliff road washed out, and Ada Pemberton had her thumb on the key before the bell had finished ringing. Whitby was asking for a doctor. Scarborough wanted one too, and the line between them hummed like a kettle about to boil. She sent the message on, tap by tap, while the rain came sideways past the window of the little office above the harbour.

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Then the sky opened over the signal pole. There was no thunder, only a white crack and a smell like struck flint, and the sounder jumped out of its bracket. When Ada got her hands back on the table, the paper tape was still crawling through the machine, and across one length of it a jagged mark had burned itself into the paper, black at the edges, a bolt with no colour in its middle. The message beneath it was gone. The doctor came anyway, on a borrowed pony, two hours late.

Ada cut that strip free before the lad could sweep it into the bin. She carried it home in her glove and sat by the range with a steel pen and a bottle of Indian ink, tracing the scorch line by line onto the back of a tide table, then onto the lid of her tin box, then onto a card she kept tucked in her apron so she could see it when she was tired.

Her sister, who could never sit still, asked her once why she never filled the thing in. Ada laughed and said a storm had already done the shading, and the rest of the picture was the sky's business. She kept the tin box on the shelf until the day she died, and the bolt inside it was still empty.