Small black, grey and red fine line marks in a vertical row on the side of a person's ribs, photographed shirtless in a mirror.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small symbols on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A shirtless torso is shown in side profile, with the head cropped out of frame and a reflection visible in the mirror on the left. Four or five small tattoo marks run vertically along the side of the ribcage, drawn with thin lines in black, grey and red, and some appear to be partly faded. The lighting is warm and direct, and the composition keeps the focus on the tattooed area.

Fine line Ribs Symbol Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Abel Trewin kept the lamp-room at Hollin Pit for thirty-one years, and he kept a tally on the whitewashed wall beside the cage. Each shift he drew a mark against the name of every man who went down. A small hook for the ones who came up at the whistle. A dab of red ochre for the ones who came up hurt. Nobody asked what the marks were for. The men took it for a clerk's habit, the way some wives count the spoons.

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In the wet spring a lad named Tom Ardle came to the lamp-room with his cap in his hands and asked for a lamp that would last. He was seventeen and had told the overman he was twenty. Abel gave him a brass lamp with a cracked glass and told him to walk behind the older hewers, never ahead of them. "The mountain listens for who is loudest," he said. Tom laughed, took the lamp, and went down with the morning shift.

The roof came in at the eastern drift before noon. Abel stood at the cage with his hand on the rail and counted the men as they rose, grey with dust and quiet. Tom did not come. Abel waited through the second whistle and the third, and when the rope went down for the last time he chalked a line beside Tom's name, no hook, no red, and went home to eat his bread without tasting it.

At dusk the rescue party found Tom sitting in a dry pocket behind a fall of stone, the cracked lamp still burning at his feet. He had stayed where he was told to stay. Abel drew the hook that night in fresh ochre, and the wall kept it for the rest of his years, the red going softer each winter until it was only the colour of a healed scratch.