Black and white photo of three small fine line tattoos on an inner forearm: a snowflake, praying hands and a four-leaf clover.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snowflake, praying hands and clover on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three small tattoos sit in a loose row on the inner arm: a snowflake on the left, praying hands in the centre and a four-leaf clover on the right. The outlines are thin and single-weight, with no shading, and the image is in black and white. The arm fills the left and centre of the frame against a wall with a large black line pattern, and a white garment edge is visible at the right.

Fine line Forearm Snowflake Praying hands Four-leaf clover Clover Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift on Harcourt House had been dead since Easter, so the whole fourteenth floor climbed the stairs with their shopping, muttering in three languages and one dialect of Yorkshire. Someone had taped a laminated card to the stairwell door with three small drawings in biro: a snowflake, a pair of hands pressed together, and a four-leaf clover. Underneath, in careful capitals, it said LIFT IS COMING. It was not.

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I found Dev from number 9 standing under it one Tuesday, reading it twice. He worked nights at the depot and pushed a battered pram up nine flights every evening, because his daughter would only sleep to the rattle of the lift doors. He told me the snowflake meant the boiler would hold until February, the hands meant the council would answer, and the clover meant the rest was luck. He was half joking. The other half had already written three letters to the housing office and had heard nothing back.

The card lasted until March. I confessed to Dev on the landing that I had written it myself, and drawn the little pictures to make it look like a child's, so nobody would bin it. He laughed so hard he had to sit on the bottom stair. The engineers came on the Thursday, banged at the doors for an hour, and the lift rose with a groan like an old man getting out of a bath.

That evening the card had gone from the stairwell, but someone had pinned a fresh one to the back of the fire door. The same three shapes were there, and a fourth I had never drawn: a tiny lift with its doors standing open. I never learned who did it. Dev's pram went down in the lift for the first time that week, and the rattle, for once, sounded like it was going somewhere.