A man in a grey t-shirt with a black silhouette print of a profile and hands, showing black and grey traditional tattoos of a lighthouse, moths and a hot air balloon on his forearms and upper arms.

Man in grey tee with silhouette print and arm tattoos

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A man stands against a weathered plaster wall, wearing a grey t-shirt printed with a black silhouette of a face and a hand with a tattooed rose. His forearms and upper arms show black and grey tattoos, including a lighthouse, moths, a hot air balloon and a feather, drawn with bold outlines and solid black fill. The image is framed from the chest down, with the arms prominent on either side of the torso.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the grate, the lot of you, and mind the lamp. Moths come to a lamp in January the same as they come in June, and Old Ada never once shooed them. She kept the byre at Hollin Farm the winter the snow shut the lane for six weeks, and every night she had a single candle, a sheet nailed to the whitewash, and two hands that could make a woman out of nothing.

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The woman had a cloud pinned at her wrist and a rose inked on the back of her hand. When Ada turned her fingers, the woman turned her head, slow as the beam off the Farne light sweeping the water. Her profile was so sharp the children swore it could cut bread. The moths gathered on the sheet around her, and Ada said they were the woman's thoughts come to look at her face.

Then one night a lantern bobbed up the lane, and a balloon-seller came stamping in out of the snow with a folded silk bundle under one arm and a grey feather stuck in his hatband. He stood in the byre door a long time, watching the shadow. Then he said he had seen that face before, from the basket of a balloon above the moors, and he had dropped a coin for it and never gone back for the coin. Ada closed her fingers. The woman lost her head, and the byre went quiet as a held breath.

She opened her hand again, slow, and the woman breathed back into the light. The balloon-seller laughed till he coughed, and he left the feather on the sill for the candle. Ada kept it there all winter, and the moths came every night to see whether the woman would turn around.

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