Watercolour-style tattoo on the side of the ribs showing a red flower, black brush strokes and a line of printed lyrics on a grey shaded background.

Red flower and lyrics on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A red flower with soft, bleeding edges sits to the right of a block of typewriter-style lyrics printed over a grey shaded area. Sweeping black brush strokes curve around the design and trail down the side of the body. Colour is limited to red accents on black and grey shading, with loose, painterly edges and an open composition.

Ribs Flower Lyric Text Brush stroke Shading Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abernethy typed the running order every morning on the old upright typewriter, two fingers and a cigarette going out on the tin lid. By August the list had shrunk to one act and a note at the foot of the sheet that read WEATHER PERMITTING, in capitals he pressed so hard the letters came through the paper. We had not seen weather fail to permit since the spring the lion died, and nobody had thought to tell the sky.

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I sewed the paper flowers for the buttonholes, red tissue folded eight times and pinned with a hatpin, because the clowns had gone off to a holiday camp in Skegness and not come back. Velia painted the ribbons for the silks act in the afternoons, long black strokes of ink dragged across the cloth so they curled like smoke when she shook them out. She said the trick was to stop before you were sure, and she was right about most things.

On the last night he would not do it under canvas. He drove us to the end of Scarrow pier with the posts and ribbons in the back of the lorry, and he stood on the boards with his typed sheet held down by a stone. Eleven people came, two of them dogs. He said his piece without looking at the paper, the only time I ever heard him sound like a man certain of something, and then Velia went up the silks into the dusk and the black ribbons unrolled over the water like ink on wet paper.

When the tide turned, the red flower I had pinned to his lapel came loose and went out past the rail, bright as a cut, turning slowly on the swell. Abernethy watched it go and did not reach for it. He only took the sheet from under its stone, folded it twice, and struck through the last word so that it read, simply, WEATHER.