Red tattoo on the side of the ribs showing a circle above a rectangle with a dark shaded cutout, and red jagged marks beneath.

Red circle and block shapes on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A red circle sits above a larger red rectangle with a dark, shaded cutout in its lower half, and three red jagged marks run beneath it. The shapes have black outlines, with red and dark shading that creates a soft gradient across the fills. The photo is taken outdoors in daylight, with a parked white car and trees blurred in the background.

Ribs Circle Rectangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the orchard's rule before you learn the names of the trees: the picking crates are stacked by the gate each August, and nobody leaves one standing empty after dusk. Your uncle Dal presses the rule into you with a thumb on your collarbone, the way he tests a bruised pear for give. You are fourteen, and you think the rule is for little ones.

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The scarecrow lives at the end of the Bramley row, a frame of old crates lashed with baling twine. Its head is a paint tin lid with a red sun daubed on it, and its body is a crate with a jagged dark mouth cut low in the front. Three scratches run down the wood where the crows have tried it over the years. Nobody repairs them. The pickers say the marks deepen a little every season, though nobody has ever been seen holding a knife to it.

The night the wind turns, you take a torch and a tin of tar and walk out to prove something to Dal. The crows are roosting on the frame and do not lift when your light finds them. You work the nail of your thumb under the edge of the lid, expecting bare paint, and find pale wood beneath, pricked with a row of notches. You count them by torchlight. There are fourteen, one for each August someone stayed out past dark.

You stand a long time with the nail in your hand. Then you lift the empty crate from the stack by the gate, carry it back down the row, and set it upright where the wind can't reach its mouth. Before you go in, you take the knife from your back pocket and cut a fifteenth notch, shallow, the way Dal taught you to mark a row.