Realism back tattoo in black and grey showing a man in a hat and suit walking a narrow ledge between tall city buildings, with colour sleeves on both arms.

Man in a hat walking a ledge above a city

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A full back tattoo shows a figure in a fedora and long coat walking away from the viewer along a narrow ledge between tall, shaded buildings. The linework is absent and the image is built from soft, detailed greyscale shading with strong contrast in the windows and façades. The sleeves on the upper arms carry colour work, while the back itself is entirely black and grey, and the composition leads the eye down the ledge toward the bottom edge.

Realism Back Upper arm Man Hat Suit City Building Skyline Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledge was eleven inches wide, and Walter Crane had walked the whole length of it twice before the lamps came on in the Halsey Building. From my fourth-floor desk across the airshaft I could see his shoes, black and scuffed, placing themselves one in front of the other like a man counting stairs in the dark.

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Nobody in the city was supposed to know I kept field glasses in the drawer beside the typewriter. I had bought them to watch the ferries at Ardrossan, back when I still believed in ferries. Through the lenses the windows of the far block came up close, each one a grey square with a lamp or a wet curtain behind it, and between them Walter went on walking, his coat pulled tight against the wind that funnelled up the canyon from the river.

At the corner he stopped. He stood there a long minute, then turned his head towards my window as though he had known all along where the glasses were. I put them down. When I looked again he had gone on past the cornice and down the sloping gutter to the fire escape, and then he was only a dark hat dropping out of sight towards the street.

The next morning the landlord found a message chalked at the end of the ledge, four words in a clerk's careful capitals: NOT TODAY, MR HALSEY. Nobody asked me what I knew. I only typed the carbon copy for the file, the way I always do, and left the window open a crack so the city could get its air.