Close photograph of a small solid black lightning bolt tattoo on a woman's lower leg near the ankle, with black wedge shoes and dry straw on the ground.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small lightning bolt on the lower leg

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black lightning bolt sits on the front of a bare lower leg, just above the ankle. The shape is filled with black ink and has clean, simple edges with no shading. The woman is seated on dry straw and soil, wearing black wedge-heeled peep-toe shoes, and the warm, muted tones of the ground contrast with the dark tattoo.

Ankle Lightning bolt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The storm reached Ashwell Colliery at a quarter past three, and by then Mam had already given up on the dinner tin. I stood under the lamp-room eaves with Nell Corbett, watching the headgear wheel sit still against a sky the colour of wet slate. Lightning had found the winding cable an hour before, the banksman said, and the cage was stuck halfway up the shaft with eleven men in it, my dad among them.

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Nell found a nail in the dirt and began scratching at the timber prop beside the gate, drawing a jagged line through the soot over and over until the wood showed pale underneath. "Gives your hands something to do," she said. "My gran did it for her Joseph in the flood year. Said it kept the spark off him." I didn't believe a word of it, but I didn't tell her to stop either, because the rain had found its way down my collar and waiting was worse than any daft notion.

Then the lamps in the lamp room flickered, went amber, and held. A shout came up the shaft, the cage groaned, and it rose into the grey light dripping and crowded. Dad stepped out black from his cap to his boots, coughing, and the first thing he did was look for me.

He saw the mark on the prop and laughed until he coughed again. "Who's been at my timber?" Nell said nothing, only slipped the nail into her apron pocket. The bolt stayed there long after the rain had washed the rest of the yard clean, a crooked black flash on the wood, and every man who passed through that gate for the next twenty years touched it on his way down.