Black fine line tattoo of a soldier outline with a serif quote inside the figure, on skin in black ink.

Soldier outline with quote tattoo

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of a standing soldier figure frames a block of serif capital text reading a quote about standing beside a soldier. The linework is fine and even, with the figure and lettering in black ink only. The text fills most of the composition, with the outline visible around it on the skin.

Fine line Lettering Other Figure Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Ashgrove was out again, and Pauline Hebden from the housing office was standing at the bottom of the stairs with her clipboard held against her chest like a shield. She was telling the physio that she would be writing to someone in Whitehall, and that she had written to someone in Whitehall last year too. Corporal Ivor Penhale had been a corporal for nineteen years and a patient for eleven weeks, and he knew the sound a voice makes when it wants an audience. Nobody was listening to her, so she was getting louder.

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At the bottom of the stairs Cal Rennie was gripping the rail with both hands. He was nineteen, had lost his left leg below the knee in a valley a long way from here, and he had decided that morning he would climb to the physio room on his own. Halfway up he stopped, breathing like a bellows, and the sweat ran into his eyes. I went down three steps and took his elbow without saying anything. You don't tell a lad he's doing well when he's stuck. You just stand where he can feel you.

Mrs Hebden stopped mid-sentence. I watched her face change as she saw the lad's leg, the grey of his cheeks, and the empty trouser cuff folded and pinned. She didn't say sorry. She put the clipboard under her arm, came up the stairs on the other side of him, and took hold of the rail. Between the three of us we got him to the landing, one step at a time, with her counting under her breath the way I had counted for him.

At the top Cal sat down hard on the bench and laughed, then swore, then laughed again. Pauline wiped her hands on her skirt. She looked at the clipboard, then at the stairs, and I saw her decide something. The lift form was still on top of the pile. She crossed out the complaint and wrote underneath, in small square capitals, that the stairs needed a second rail on the left.