Watercolour style tattoo on the ribs showing two black silhouetted figures in front of a red-orange sun, with red paint drips running down.

Red sun and silhouetted figures on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two solid black silhouettes of standing figures, one taller than the other, set in front of a large orange-red circle. Thin black horizontal brush strokes cross the sun, and red and orange paint drips and splatters run down below the figures. The shading is loose and painterly, with soft colour edges and no fine outlines, and the composition is vertical along the side of the body.

Ribs Sun Silhouette Figure Drip Splatter Brush stroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass for nine days, and by the tenth I had stopped counting guests and started counting candles. So when the tall man came stamping through the yard door with a boy at his heels, I didn't ask where they had come from. I asked whether the child could sleep in the kitchen, where the bread ovens kept the flagstones warm, and he nodded as if I had offered him a crown.

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He paid in coins worn smooth by other hands. His pack held a paint box with a cracked lid and a stack of paper so damp it curled like bark. Before the cocks were up, the boy was at the window with his breath fogging the glass. The ridge was black, then a seam of gold, then the sun heaved itself free, red as Bramley jam and far too large, and the whole yard went rose to the gate.

The man was already outside. He laid a sheet on the mounting block and worked fast: a wash of madder for the sun, then a loaded brush dragged flat across it in long, unsteady strokes, the way wind tears at cloud. The boy pressed his red fingers to the whitewash beside the door. When I asked what the picture was meant to be, the man said only that it was the morning they left, and that the boy would remember it better than he would.

They went down the road at noon, the tall shadow and the small one stretching across the drifts until the snow swallowed them. In April the thaw came, and red ran in streaks down the lime wall by the door. I scrubbed it twice. Then the damp rose up through the plaster and two dark shapes stood out beside the red, one taller than the other, and I left them there.