Colour tattoo of a ribcage, red rose, ear and red-winged moth on a forearm, set against a soft green wash.

Ribcage, rose and moth on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A ribcage, a red rose with green leaves, an ear and a moth with red wings are arranged down the inside of a forearm. The linework is fine and the ribcage is shaded in sepia and grey, while the rose and moth wings use saturated red. A pale green wash sits behind the motifs, and the photo is cropped to the arm and part of a striped top.

Forearm Ribcage Rose Ear Moth Anatomy Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the rib in the bracken below Hollin Wood on the morning the bell at St Aldric's cracks, and you carry it home wrapped in your scarf, because your mother has always said bones should not be carried bare. The fox it belonged to is long gone to the rooks. What you keep is the arch of it, pale and light as a lath, and you hang it on a nail above the washstand, where the lamplight catches its bars and throws them across the whitewash like the shadow of a gate.

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Your grandfather was a stone-carver who could not hear past the first hymn in church, so he made himself an ear from beeswax and tallow and left it on the sill to harden. Nobody in the house would touch it. You did. You learned that if you turned it toward the lane at dusk, it held the village the way a shell holds the sea: the latch of the baker's yard, the rector counting coins into his palm, the miller's girl singing the same four lines over and over because she had forgotten the fifth.

The moth came in the second week of September, red as a poppy under the lamp, and settled on the wax as though it had been invited. Its wings were thin as the petals you pressed in the big atlas, and when you held your breath you could hear it too, a dry tick like a clock running down. Two nights later the rose by the gate opened all at once, heavy and dark, and its smell came through the window and filled the room where the rib hung.

In the morning the ear was gone from the sill and a single petal lay on the step. You bent to pick it up and heard, quite clearly, your own voice from the night before, saying a thing you had only ever thought, carried out past the hedge and down the lane towards Hollin Wood, where the moth had gone to tell the trees.