Black and grey forearm tattoo of a ruined wooden cabin and a dark silhouetted figure, with the script line Celebrate the way the night hides scars above it.

Ruined cabin and script lyric on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the forearm shows a broken wooden cabin with a collapsed roof, two windows and scattered debris, with a dark silhouetted figure standing on the roofline. Above the scene, a handwritten script line reads Celebrate the way the night hides scars. The shading is soft and tonal, with fine outlines on the logs and roof, and the composition is centred on the forearm.

Lettering Forearm Cabin House Silhouette Figure Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick with frost. Right, sit on the stool by the stove, the one that doesn't wobble. You'll have seen the old cabin on the bend below Coldharbour lock, the one with its back broken? Everybody round here knows it, and nobody's been near it since the fire.

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Thirty winters back, a widow called Nan Corrie lived there with her two boys and a goat that hated the lot of them. Winter came early that year and the river rose over the towpath in a single night. We brought the Mary Lowe up past the cabin at dusk, and her chimney was smoking like it always did. By the time we'd made fast, the smoke had turned orange and the roof was going.

Nobody could get in. The youngest, Eli, was nine, and he'd gone back for the goat. Folk stood on the bank in their coats and shouted, and the river roared back at them and nothing else. Then, up on the roofline, a figure came out of the smoke, small and black against the fire, arms out like someone balancing on a wall. We all thought it was the boy. My mother swore it was only the goat's shadow, though she was never sure, and nor was anybody.

The figure stayed put until the rafters gave and the whole thing slumped into the mud. Next morning there was nothing left but the walls and a black chimney, and the boys were found safe in the lock-keeper's hut. Nan never went back. But on clear nights, when you come round that bend in the dark, the roofline stands against the stars, and if you look hard there's a shape on it still. Don't wave. Just give it a nod, the way Corrie always did.