Solid black blackwork silhouette of a man in a suit with curly hair, beside a street lamp, tattooed on the ankle and lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette of a suited man beside a lamp on a lower leg

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette shows a man in a dark suit with curly hair, standing beside a tall lamp post with a small lantern at its top. The shapes are filled with flat black ink with a few small areas of pale skin left as negative space, and there is no shading or grey. The composition sits vertically on the front of the lower leg near the ankle, with a wooden floor and yellow wall in the background.

Blackwork Ankle Silhouette Man Suit Lantern Building

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lantern over the Palais door has gone out again, so you stand under the lamp post on the corner of Harrow Street with your collar up and your hat in your hand, counting the brass notes coming through the wall. Eight bars of the same tune. Ruth said she would come out for the last waltz, and the last waltz was twenty minutes ago.

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A man in a doorway across the road is watching you with the patience of someone who has seen a hundred girls not come out. He lights a cigarette, the match flaring and dying, and you think how easily a face disappears into the dark when there is nothing lit behind it. Your shoes are wet. The pavement shines like a piano lid.

The doors swing open and a rush of saxophone spills onto the street. It is not Ruth. It is her cousin Vi, pinning on a glove, who says she left at nine with a sailor from Chatham. She presses a scrap of dance card into your hand with a telephone number on it, the ink run where it got wet.

You fold the card into your breast pocket and step back into the light, where the hall windows can still see you. Ruth will look for you here. That is the arrangement. You let the lamp settle across your shoulders like a coat and wait for the next waltz to begin, because somebody has to be the one who stays.