Red leopard print down the spine
Back · Mixed · Photo
A woman with her hair tied up is photographed from behind, showing a column of red leopard print spots with black outlines running down the centre of her back. The spots vary in size and shape and taper into a loose trail towards the lower back. The background shows shelves of tattoo ink bottles, and the bare back is the main focus of the framing.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The lift in Carrow House had been broken since March, so Mrs Adebayo's rolls of fabric went up the stairs on my shoulders, nine floors, one bolt at a time. She paid me in tea and gossip, which suited me fine.
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The order came from a theatre in Leeds: a coat for a leopard in a touring pantomime, red and black spots, cut to follow the spine. Mrs Adebayo spent three nights stamping the pattern with a block carved from a potato, then going over every spot with a biro, then dabbing in red paint from a jam jar. The spots shrank as they ran toward the hem, because she said a spine should look like it was thinning out into the dark.
On the Thursday the coat vanished from the drying rack on the landing. Dolores in flat 14 swore she saw a flash of red going down the stairwell at dawn, low and quick, like something with somewhere to be. The window on the ninth-floor landing was propped open onto the car park, and the lift was still broken.
We found it folded on the bench of the bus shelter by the ring road, the spots trailing off the seat like a dropped ribbon. Pinned to the collar was a note in Mrs Adebayo's looping hand: Bring it back when you're done with it. I still don't know who borrowed it. But all that month I counted the red spots on the stairwell wall, and they always came out one short.
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