Black and grey outline tattoo of six beer can ring pulls in a grid across a man's stomach, with a red cup in his hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six ring pulls on a belly

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless older man with a white beard stands outdoors, holding a red plastic cup. Across his large stomach is a grey outline tattoo of six circular drink can ring pulls arranged in a two by three grid. The thin, even linework is shown in grey on skin, with light shading and no colour ink.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your tongues and I will tell you how the six lids of Harrowmere came to hold the kingdom together. Every sovereign there wore the same six rings of tin, one for each of the old provinces, and each ring had to be pulled by a different hand before a treaty could be sealed. The first king, Osric Bellwether, thought the custom foolish. He pulled his own ring so hard that it tore clean away, and he wept over the scrap of metal for a week.

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The second king, a sensible woman named Mab Tolliver, had the rings set in a grid on the great door of the council hall, two rows of three, so that a visiting envoy could see the whole kingdom laid out and count it. Each ring had a small loop of metal that a child could lift, and the children of Harrowmere learned to lift them on feast days, when the wine went round and the nobles were too full to notice. Mab said a kingdom was only a set of small things that agreed to open together.

When the river flooded the lower towns in the year of the long rain, the six provinces quarrelled over the grain barges. Each lord wanted his ring pulled first. The steward, who was tired and had no patience for such nonsense, walked to the door at dusk, lifted all six loops in one slow breath, and the sound went out over the water like a bell that could not decide what it meant. The lords came out with their cups still in their hands, and by morning they had split the barges six ways and nobody who could be saved had drowned.

They say the door still hangs in the hall, and that the rings shine where the children have worn them. Whenever a quarrel begins, someone is sent to count the loops, and the count always comes out the same. Six. Pull them together or pull none.