Black ink line drawing on white paper of solid black lips with a wavy, ribbon-like line of smoke rising upwards from them.

Lips with wavy smoke line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing on white paper shows a pair of solid black lips at the bottom, with small white highlights on the lower lip. A single thin, wavy line rises from the lips, looping and twisting upwards like smoke or a ribbon, and fades out near the top of the sheet. The contrast is strong, and the composition is a tall, centred design with lots of empty space around it.

Lip Smoke Ribbon Line drawing Wavy line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, there's a bit of a lip on that stone, and the lamp at the post has been out since the spring floods, so you'll go by feel the way my grandmother did. Sit down. The customs man at Halvard Bridge had a habit of asking travellers what they were carrying, and a woman came to him one November with a yard of grey ribbon wound round her wrist and nothing else. He asked what was in her bag. She said a kiss. He laughed and waved her through, because nobody smuggles a kiss, and so she walked into the valley with it still on her.

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She had promised it to a man on the far side who made his living mending clocks, and who had gone quiet when the river rose and took his workshop. Every night she unwound a little more of the ribbon and let it trail behind her up the lane, so he could follow it home if he ever came back. It twisted over the drystone walls, looped round the chapel gate, and went up past the bakery where the smell of burnt sugar hung in the frost. People stopped to watch it lift and drift. Some said it was smoke from the kilns, some said it was a thread a witch had dropped.

He never came. But the ribbon kept rising, and by the time the lane gave out at the top of the hill it was thin as breath, and there was nothing left of it at all except a faint grey line curling away into the empty sky, which is why, if you stand where I'm standing and look up, you can still see where she let go.