Black ink tattoo on the upper arm showing a savanna scene with elephants, a giraffe and trees above an inverted city skyline.

Savanna and city skyline on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows a row of trees, an elephant, a giraffe, a small standing figure and a second animal on a horizon line. Beneath this, mirrored tall buildings hang down from the horizon, with a short word partly visible between them. The ink is dark and mostly uniform, set against lighter skin and a grey top at the edge of the frame.

Upper arm Elephant Giraffe Tree Skyline Building Silhouette Landscape Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had carried the mirror panels for the Harmony Brothers' fair since she was nine, and she knew the weight of each one by hand. The last panel, a tall oval with a silvered edge, had come from a closed picture house in Leeds, and it showed nothing at all when the lamps were off. Tonight the lamps were on. The ground was damp from the rain that had rolled over the common, and the crowd at the gate was thin and restless.

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Her uncle Tomasz set the oval against the back of the tent and angled it so the tops of the rides showed in the lower half. "People want to see a world that's upside down," he said, and went off to shout at the dodgems. Dilys stood before it alone. In the glass the savanna she had known from a cracked schoolroom map appeared as if on still water, the flat gold ground and the acacia trees standing on it. Beneath the horizon line, hanging like stalactites, were the towers of a city she had never visited, their windows lit one by one as if someone were counting them.

A child came in with a sticky hand and pressed a penny to the frame. Dilys watched the reflection shift. The giraffe bent its neck down toward the buildings, and the small figure on the ridge turned round to look. For a moment she could read the letters strung between the towers, a word cut off at the edge, one that wanted finishing. She told the child to step back. The child didn't.

At midnight, unhooking the panel, she found the silver backing warm, as though someone had leaned close to it for a long time. She wrapped it in the grey blanket, carried it to the lorry, and left the city hanging from the glass, waiting for the next town to turn it the right way up.