Silhouette stencil sheets on a wooden table

Black and grey · Flash

A scattered collection of stencil cards laid on a light wooden table, each with a white silhouette cut from black backing. The designs include a Dalek, a sonic screwdriver, a bow tie, a winged angel, a police box with the words GERONIMO and ALLONS-Y, and several profile heads. The silhouettes are solid white shapes with no shading, and the image is a straight-on phone photo.

Silhouette Stencil Profile Dalek Bow tie Angel Police box Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Oddie cut her silhouettes on the kitchen table with a craft knife and a steel rule, because her father had said a line you could not undo was a line you had to think about. By the time the lamps went on in Hollin Row she had a tin of cards stacked to the lid: a bow tie for the bank clerk who never wore one, a Dalek for the boy who wanted to be shouted at by something bigger than the pit wheel, a police box with its name across the door in letters she had cut twice because the first had come out like a sneeze.

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Nobody bought them. They were traded, folded into coat pockets and handed over at the lamp-room door. Old Ferris swore the angel card had got his wife through the winter fever, though she had only been sitting up with the window open and the stencil propped against the sill like a lodger. Mags did not argue. A stencil is only a shape you agree to see.

The trouble came in March, when the whistle at Number Four failed to sound and forty men stood in the cold wondering why. Mags went up the lane with her tin under her arm. She laid the cards on the wet wooden bench of the lamp-room, one after another, the screwdriver last. Every silhouette had a profile, and every profile was turned toward the shaft, as if it were listening.

The whistle sounded that night. Nobody asked how. Mags kept the tin, and now and then she cut a new face on a card and set it on the sill, facing the hills, so that whoever was out there could see which way home was.