Black and grey realism tattoo of stacked polaroid-style photographs showing a swing by water, with the script words Every summer has a story, on a upper back.

Stacked polaroids with a swing and script quote

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A stack of three polaroid-style photographs sits on the skin, with the top print showing a swing hanging near water and trees in soft focus. The photo details are shaded in fine grey gradients, while the outlined frames and the handwritten script line beneath use crisp black linework. The image is in black and grey and is centred on the shoulder blade area.

Realism Lettering Back Water Tree Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ottilie, the tide has finally taken the lane behind the old boathouse, so I went down with the crate before the water could have the prints too. Most were soft with damp and came apart in my hands. The swing was still there, or the frame of it, leaning out over the mudflat where the lake used to be.

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Your great-aunt Maud hung that swing from the oak the summer of the drought, the year the reservoir gave up its church. Three prints survived in a tin. The first shows the swing empty and the water beyond it, flat as a ledger page. The second has her brother Tom pushing so hard his shoe is only a blur. The third is the top one I have carried home in my coat, and on its back Maud wrote the line I have copied at the foot of this letter. She never explained it, and I have spent forty years trying to work out what she meant.

I think she meant that summers are kept by whoever remembers them badly. Tom drowned in October, off the same point where the swing rope was tied. Nobody wrote a story about it. We kept a photograph and let the rest go soft at the edges, like the paper.

Take the tin with you when you go north. Hang the top picture somewhere a breeze can reach it. When someone asks what that summer was like, tell them the swing went too high, and that someone laughed the whole way up.

Every summer has a story.

Yours, Auntie Hen