Black and grey tattoo of two pairs of mirrored skeletons reaching their arms towards each other across the ribs.

Mirrored skeletons across the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two pairs of skeletons in mirrored poses, each figure leaning and reaching outwards with long arms, arranged horizontally across the ribcage below the bust. The linework is clean and dark, with grey shading on the bones and skulls. The design is in black and grey only, and the photograph is framed to show the torso from the chest to the waistband.

Ribs Skeleton Skull Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dance hall on Calder Street had been closed since the war, but the skeletons still came out on Thursdays, when the gas man went home early and the moon sat right over the chimney pots. Mags Duffy swept the boards every morning and every morning found chalk marks in new positions, two pairs of bones leaning toward each other like gossips at a bus stop.

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The first pair was Ferdy and Old Harold, who had been a pair of lodgers at number nine until the bombs took the roof and their last landlord with it. Harold still had his pipe clenched in a jaw that had no teeth to hold it. Ferdy had a habit of flinging his arms out whenever he was about to tell a lie, and tonight both of them were stretched sideways across the boards, reaching for the other pair across the floor like men who had lost a bet and wanted the money back.

The other pair were the Misses Pinch, twins who had never once agreed on a hymn. They did not speak, of course. Bones don't. But they flung their long arms towards Ferdy and Harold with an energy that made the bunting shiver, and Mags understood, as she set her broom against the piano, that the four of them had been trying to pass a message across the room for seventy years and never once managed to hold hands.

She took the chalk from her apron and drew a single line down the middle of the floor, then rubbed out the bit where the arms met. By morning the hall was swept and the bones were lying flat and innocent, all four of them, fingertips just a finger's width apart. Mags left the lamp lit for them. Some things are worth leaving unfinished.