Black and grey sketch-style tattoo on a forearm showing a wooden sign reading EDGE, a seated animal, a small figure and a spiky creature along a ledge.

Sign reading EDGE and figures on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a wooden sign with the word EDGE above a ledge, with an animal lying beside it and a small seated figure on the right. Linework is loose and sketchy, with stippled dots used for shading on the ground and the figure. The design is in black ink and grey tones and runs along the length of the forearm, which is photographed against a red top.

Forearm Sign Animal Figure Lettering Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the wall, child, and don't lean over the way you did yesterday. Hold my coat if you must. That board says EDGE, and it has said so since before the sea went brown and the cranes stopped turning in Harrow Shelf. The council nailed it up after the first slump, and under the paint, in smaller letters, somebody scratched KEEP OFF with a nail. Nobody bothered to sand it out. You don't argue with a warning when the warning is the only thing standing between you and the drop.

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Tuesday was old Maddox's dog, a long grey lurcher with a face like a bent spoon. Every afternoon he stretched himself out along the warm stone at the lip, nose pointed at the flat grey water, and refused to be moved by anybody short of Maddox himself. Beside him sat Ida Pell, who was eleven and had no business up there. She kept a slate on her knees and drew the world as she saw it, and where she wanted the ground to look crumbled she pressed her thumb into the dust and stippled it with dots, a hundred little pricks of shadow until the stone looked like it was giving way.

Then came the night the ledge began to slide. We heard it from our beds, a sound like a long breath let out. By morning half the Shelf had gone into the water, and the rest was cracked like an old plate. Tuesday would not get up. Maddox dragged at his collar until his hands bled, and still the dog lay there, legs out, and Ida sat beside him with her slate. People said she'd gone soft in the head. But when the surveyors finally came with their poles, they found the stone under her chalk line was the only ground that held. Everything she had shaded was gone. Everything she had left clean was still there.

The sign still leans where it fell, and nobody has ever moved it. Tuesday is buried under the bank by the old pump house. Ida is grown now and runs the ferry. Every morning she sits at the edge, dog-eared slate in her lap, and draws the line again.