Rib cage and red sun on upper arm
Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo
A solid black rib cage sits over a flat orange circle, with a black triangle below that fades from dark grey at the top to black at the point. The ribs use bold, solid black shapes with clean edges, and the orange is the only colour in the design. Part of an unrelated grey linework tattoo is visible at the left edge of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The lamplighter of Harrowdell kept a red sun in a tin box under his bed, and every evening he took it out to see whether the fields had forgotten the way to the river. Nobody in the valley knew where it had come from. His mother had said it was a coin from the old king, cut in half and fired in a kiln until the metal bled orange. The ribs were a different matter. They were the bars of the cage that had held the first lamp-keeper, and the black triangle beneath them was the cinder that never cooled.
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One winter the river froze to the bottom and the mill stopped turning. The miller's daughter came up the hill with a loaf wrapped in cloth and asked him to light the sun. He told her it would only burn if someone gave it something to hold, so she unwound the wool from her own neck and pressed it into the tin. The sun took the wool, glowed, and the ribs of the cage sprang open like the boards of a boat in a flood.
The river ran that night as if it had never stopped. In the morning the miller's daughter was gone, and the tin box lay empty on the table, the lid still warm. The lamplighter walked down to the water and found her scarf caught on a willow, knotted round one of the branches, and beside it a thread of wool no thicker than a hair, still glowing faintly orange.
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