Black and grey realism tattoo on a calf showing a screaming woman with her hands at her throat in front of a dark fence.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Screaming woman with hands at her throat

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman with her head tilted back and her mouth wide open in a scream, with two hands gripping at her neck. Smooth shading and detailed rendering model the hair, skin and fingers, while a dark background with a fence-like pattern frames the figure. The design uses only black and grey ink.

Realism Calf Woman Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire went up along the top of the wood fence the spring after the Hollins pit closed, and by June nobody in Carrick Row could say which of the men had strung it. My mother said it kept the children off the spoil heap. My father said it kept the dark in. I was twelve and believed the second, because the pit lamps still burned on the night shift for a month after the cage stopped, and you could see them through the mesh like fish under ice.

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Nan Ivy sat at the front window with her hands folded on the sill. She had buried two husbands and a son in the same churchyard, and the only time I heard her raise her voice was when the new manager's wife came up the lane with a clipboard. That was the evening the scream came from the far side of the fence. It was not a child's scream. It came from somewhere low down, where the coal dust settled, and it went on so long that Mr Pardoe ran out in his shirt sleeves with a lamp held high.

We found nothing on the spoil heap but a glove, a man's, stiff with cold, and a line of prints in the grey dust that stopped dead at the wire. Nan lifted the glove on the end of a stick and fed it to the grate. She waited until the flames had caught the leather before she spoke. The dark, she said, does not climb out of the ground to take you. It climbs out to be heard, and the only answer it understands is silence.

I went back alone the next morning. The wire hummed in a thin wind, and along the far side somebody had pressed a row of small black hands flat against the mesh, as if to hold something in or hold something off. I counted them twice. There were seven, and I could name only six people from Carrick Row who had gone under.