Woman with a black and grey tattoo sleeve on her left arm featuring dice, a tattoo of ornate swirls across her abdomen and script lettering on her thigh.

Sleeve, torso and thigh tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a sleeve of black and grey tattoos on the left arm, including dice and ornate scrollwork, alongside swirling ornamental linework across the abdomen. A block of cursive script runs down the thigh, with a quotation partly legible, and the lines are crisp against the skin. The ink is almost entirely dark grey and black, and the photograph is cropped to the torso and arm against a blurred outdoor background.

Lettering Forearm Upper arm Thigh Other Dice Script Swirl Ornament Scrollwork Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dice came out of Sal's cuff on the third bar of the waltz, which was how I knew the night had gone sideways. Nobody rolls in a dance hall unless they've already lost something. The Starlite Ballroom in Hull had a sprung floor that gave under your heels and a band that never stopped for breakfast, and by midnight the chalk marks by the back door were the only honest thing in the building.

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Sal rolled a pair of bone dice across the boards, one ivory, one nearly black from years of thumbs. Five and a three. He looked at them the way a surgeon studies an X-ray. "Thirty-one years I've carried these," he said, "and they've never once told me a lie." Across the floor a girl in a grey dress was counting the couples like she'd been asked to keep score for the Lord.

I had a letter in my jacket, unopened, from my brother in Aldershot, and I had been carrying it since Tuesday the way you carry a stone in your shoe. Sal knew. He had watched me touch my pocket every time the tempo changed. "Read it or bet on it," he said. "Don't do both."

I put the letter on the table and slid it across to him. He turned the dice over in his palm, rolled once more, and the ivory came up six. Outside, the sea came over the sea wall without asking anyone's permission, and somewhere behind the bandstand a fiddle kept playing for nobody in particular.