Pen sketch of a spine and pelvis in shaded ink on white, with the handwritten caption "that's hip." beneath it.

Spine and pelvis sketch with hip pun

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a human spine running down into a pelvis, with the vertebrae and iliac bones drawn in outline and cross-hatched shading. Some sections of bone carry purple-blue ink while the rest is grey and black. The skeleton is centred on a white background, with the handwritten caption "that's hip." below the pelvis.

Spine Skeleton Anatomy Sketch Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pip, I have pinned the drawing to the potting shed wall, where the mint keeps trying to squeeze through the gap in the door. The spine took me three evenings. I shaded the lower vertebrae in violet ink because Mr Callow, who edited the old anatomy primer, wanted the joints picked out for students who kept mixing up their lumbar and their sacral. I thought they looked like a row of plums on a string.

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The caption was my doing, I confess. Mr Callow always said a diagram needed a human touch, and I had been reading his puns in the margins for six years. So I wrote "that's hip" underneath in my neatest hand, and he laughed so hard he dropped his pipe into the tea urn. The printers refused to set it. It went out on a postcard instead, and sold rather better than the textbook ever did.

This morning Mrs Okafor leaned over the fence holding a courgette the size of a cricket bat and asked whether the drawing was a map of the garden. I said it was the shape of a body holding itself up. She said that sounded like her knees in February. I told her to bend from the hips rather than the back, and she looked at me as though I had invented the idea myself.

The pelvis is the part that carries everything, Pip, as you were always the one to ask. Write soon and tell me whether the pear tree survived the frost. Your loving Aunt Eileen.