Fine line black tattoo on the ribs showing a row of an owl, lightning bolt, crescent moon, sphere and triangle motif above the script phrase Our Hearts Beat As One.

Owl and charms script line tattoo on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black fine line tattoo sits on the side of the ribcage, with a thin hanging line carrying a winged object, an owl, a lightning bolt, a crescent moon, a sphere and a triangle with a circle and vertical line. Beneath the motifs, the words Our Hearts Beat As One are written in cursive script. The photograph is black and white, with a hand resting at the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Owl Lightning bolt Crescent moon Sphere Triangle Script Quote Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

When the Ouse broke its banks in the hard winter of 1947, Mags Pettifer strung a length of tarred wire across her back kitchen and began hanging things on it. Each charm was a thing she was frightened of losing. There was a wooden owl her husband Ted had whittled from a cricket bat handle, a lightning bolt cut from a tin of Kiwi polish, and a glass fishing float she called the moon because it was round and cold to the touch. The last hook held a sphere of blue marble from the village school, and a triangle of driftwood with a grey pebble wedged in its middle, which she said was the only honest charm on the line.

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Ted had taken the skiff out to check the eel traps on the Tuesday, and by the Thursday the fog had come down so thick that the lamplighter couldn't see the cut. Mags didn't sleep. She sat under the wire with the kettle going cold and talked to the owl the way other women talked to the wireless. Every hour she tapped the moon with a bent spoon so it would ring, because a thing that rings is a thing that's still there.

On the Saturday morning the skiff came up the drain with a splintered oar and no Ted in it, only a note folded into the owl's wing. It read that he had gone ashore at Welney to find a dry shilling for the tea, and that he'd be back before the kettle boiled. He was. He came in soaked to the knees and found her hanging a new charm, a scrap of wet cord knotted in a single line.

Mags pinned the words the two of them had chalked on the beam that winter above the stove, where the steam could reach them every morning. Our hearts beat as one, it said, in her best copperplate, and Ted never once asked her what the moon was for.