Colour tattoo of a prism splitting light into a rainbow, set in a cracked brick wall on the ankle.

Prism and rainbow through a brick wall on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A prism is drawn in grey with a white light beam entering from the left and a rainbow spectrum exiting to the right. The prism and rainbow sit in a dark opening surrounded by grey-shaded bricks that appear to break out of the skin. The shading is smooth and realistic, with the bricks given a three-dimensional, lit edge, and the rainbow is the only saturated colour against the black and grey.

Realism Ankle Rainbow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wall came down on a Tuesday, and Harold Pike was the only man on the crew who wanted the rubble sorted by hand. The foreman called him soft. Harold called it manners. Beneath the lath and plaster of a bricked-up chapel window in Hebden Bridge, he found a wedge of glass the size of a child's shoe, cloudy with mortar dust. He rubbed it on his sleeve until the edges showed clean.

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He carried it home in a biscuit tin. That evening he propped it on the kitchen sill where the low sun came through the gap in the blind, and a white line crossed the room and split on the far wall into red, orange, and the green of the bus shelter outside. His daughter Moira stood in the doorway and counted the colours aloud, the way she had at six, before she stopped speaking to him.

Next morning he took the glass to the chapel's last trustee, a woman in a wax jacket who said the window had been bricked up in 1971, when the congregation ran out of money and nerve. She asked what the thing was worth. Harold said nothing. He wanted to know who had hidden it there, and why it had been kept in the dark.

He never sold it. He hung it on a length of fishing line in the old opening, so that every afternoon the light came through the empty frame and laid its colours across the pavement, and passers-by stopped to look down at their own shadows lit up like something holy.