Close photo of a small black sound wave tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a grey top pulled up and denim jeans below.

Sound wave tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a single horizontal sound wave made of black vertical spikes of varying height, centred on the side of the ribcage. Its lines are solid black with no shading, and the outline is crisp against the warm skin tone. The photo is taken at close range, with the grey top gathered above the tattoo and the denim waistband below, and the background is blurred with a few indistinct objects.

Ribs Spike

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Carrow Road market since before dawn, hammering the tarpaulins until the stallholders had to shout to hear themselves. Maud Pryce stood between a tray of wet pears and a van selling phone cases, holding her recorder inside a freezer bag with a hole cut for the mic. Ted Hollis was due to call the last fish auction of the year at eleven, and the council had already sent letters saying the hall would be pulled down in March.

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"Steady now," Ted said, not turning round. He had a voice like a gravel lorry reversing, and when he lifted it the pigeons went up off the gutter. "Mackerel, six for a pound, six for a pound, who'll give me five?" She watched the needle on the little screen jump, a row of black spikes that climbed and dropped with every word. Between calls he drank tea from a flask lid and the line went almost flat, just a fuzz of rain. She had asked him once why he never called softer. He said the boats could only hear the top of it.

By noon the rain had got into the mic despite the bag, and the file was a mess of hiss. She nearly deleted it. Then she zoomed in on the last call, the one Ted gave when the crates were empty, and saw the spikes stop short against the quiet, like a sentence with no full stop.

That evening she sat in the van with the laptop on her knees and played it back. Ted's voice came out thin and small through the speakers. She kept the flat stretch between his calls, the bit where nothing was being sold, and cut everything else.