Black and grey realistic tattoo of an open metal zip running down the inner forearm, with the slider near the lower arm.

Open zip tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a forearm with a tattoo of an open metal zip, shown with shaded grey teeth, a silver slider and a dark fabric gap between the two sides. The zip runs diagonally down the arm and the shading gives it a raised, three-dimensional look against the pale skin. The background is a dark leather sofa, and the hand is raised at the top of the frame.

Realism Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Ada Pilling kept the travelling coat on a nail by the back door, because her son would not come into the front room while it hung there. It was black wool with a zip the length of a man's forearm, and the teeth were brass, cold to the thumb even in July. Nobody in Hebden asked where she had learned to set a zip like that. They brought her their torn hems and split seams, and she mended them and took their pennies.

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The trouble started the winter the mill shut. A man came to the step with a bad cough and a wife who had gone quiet, and asked whether the coat might open just a little, enough to put a hand through and take out the one thing he needed. Ada told him the zip did not open for hands. It opened for what a person had carried too long to put down. He laughed and went away down the cobbles, and by March the cough had settled in his chest and stayed.

After that the coat was never still on its nail. Her granddaughter Mary heard it shift at night, the slider ticking against the wall like a clock. When Ada died in the spring, Mary took the coat down, and the lining was stitched all over with small names in red thread, some faded, some fresh. Mary pulled the slider up one tooth. Cold air came out, smelling of wet stone and bread, and she saw a yard of dark fabric where her own grief should have been.

She closed it again, one tooth at a time, the way her grandmother had shown her, and hung the coat back on its nail by the door.