Close-up of a black linework scroll vine tattoo with small blue dots running along the outer rim of an ear.

Scrolling vine tattoo along the ear

Other · Mixed · Photo

A black linework vine of looping scrolls and curls runs from the top of the ear down along the helix towards the lobe. Small blue dots are scattered between the scrolls. The lines are even and the ink sits cleanly on the skin, with the ear filling most of the frame against dark hair.

Other Vine Scroll Curl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrow Cut trusted a silent pit, so when the cage stopped at four hundred feet on the Tuesday after Whitsun, we all stood in the wet yard and listened. My brother Tom was on the low seam with the Cornish boys. Mam said nothing. She went back into the kitchen, took the ink bottle down from the dresser where Granddad kept his tally marks, and began drawing on the good tablecloth with a sable brush she had bought for lettering the chapel banns.

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She drew a vine that ran from one corner to the other, looping and doubling back on itself. Every curl was a knock. Tom and I had learned the code before we could read, three taps for a man alive and one for a man who could not answer, and Mam had turned it into scrolls so the women could count them with their fingers while the men were underground. She dotted the spaces between the curls with a pin dipped in the blue dye from the Sunday hats, and when I asked why, she said the dots were the bluebells that came up along the tip-path every May, and that a vine without flowers was only a warning.

At dusk the wall of the shaft began to answer. I heard it through the stones of the kitchen, faint and far off, and I went to the table with my finger ready. One knock, then a pause, then the long run of taps that matched the first loop, then the next. I counted them as I had been taught, one curl to a knock, sliding my nail along the ink so I would not lose my place.

When the last scroll came up through the rock, Mam set the brush down on the dresser and did not pick it up again. The tablecloth stayed on the table for thirty years, and nobody in the village ever asked her to wash it.