A small solid black curved symbol tattooed on the side of a person's ribs, with a dark garment pulled up beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small curved black mark on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single small tattoo of a bold black curved shape, tapering at both ends like a flame or swoosh, sits on the side of the torso. The ink is solid black with smooth, even edges and no shading. The skin tone is warm against a dark garment and a blue denim top, with the tattoo placed near the centre of the frame.

Ribs Swirl Flame

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Corran House had been dead for three weeks, and by the second week the residents had stopped writing to the council and started knocking on my door instead, because I was the one with the torch and the key to the plant room. Mr Dunmore on eleven needed his oxygen cylinders carried up. Mrs Achebe on nine wanted her shopping. Nobody else was going to climb fourteen flights with a bag of potatoes.

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Dunmore had blown glass at a works in Stourbridge for forty years, and he watched me set down the last bag as if I might drop it. He kept a gas ring on the side and a kettle that never quite boiled. 'Look at the tail,' he said, and struck a match, then tipped his hand so the flame leaned. 'Everyone draws fire like a teardrop. It isn't. It's a stroke. It swells, then runs out of breath and tapers to nothing, like a good line of ink.' He drew it in the condensation on the window with one knuckle, thick at the bottom, thinning up and away.

I tried it on the stairwell wall that night with a marker pen, the strip lights stuttering on the landing, and got it wrong four times before the curve sat right. It looked like something a child would scribble to mean flame, and yet it was exact. I left it there. Nobody wiped it off, which for Corran House was a kind of miracle.

Dunmore went into the home at Easter. The lift was fixed the week after, by a man who rode it up once and then stood on the landing looking at the wall for a long time. He didn't ask who had drawn it. He reached into his coat for a pencil and, under my line, very small, added a second flick, the way you'd initial a thing you agreed with.