Black and grey tattoo of a man in a jacket with one arm raised and a microphone stand in his other hand, placed on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Standing performer figure on the side of the body

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a full-length male figure in a jacket and belted trousers, with one arm raised high and the other hand holding a microphone stand, legs apart in a wide stance. The linework is bold and dark, with solid black areas for the jacket and shadows and lighter grey tones on the shirt and trousers. The figure fills most of the frame against plain pale skin, and the photo is taken at a slight angle.

Ribs Man Jacket Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the last train's an hour off and I've got the room for it. You want to know about the night the man in the long jacket came off the Leeds connection at Harrowgate Junction with a microphone stand under one arm and no band at all? Nobody knew where the band had got to. Mrs Pilling at the buffet swore they'd gone on to Carlisle without him, and she was never wrong about trains, only about men.

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He didn't ask for a hotel. He asked the porter where the echo was best, and the porter, who was young and didn't know any better, took him up to the iron footbridge over the platforms, where the wind goes through the girders like a choir. The stand went up, the mic clipped on, and the man planted his feet wide on the wet timber and flung one arm at the roof as if the roof owed him money. Then he sang. Not loud at first. Just enough that the signalman stepped out of his box to listen, and the goods driver cut his engine and leaned on the cab.

Here's the thing folk forget. A song needs an audience the way a rail needs a sleeper. By the second chorus there were forty people on the platform, pyjamas under coats, a boy with a lamp, and the stationmaster himself with his cap in his hands. Nobody clapped until the end, and then the bridge rang like a struck bell.

Morning came. The stand was still there, leaning against the ticket gate with a card tied to its base: For whoever needs a voice tonight. Mrs Pilling kept that card in her apron for thirty years. The stand is in the lost property office now, and on still nights, if you stand on the footbridge and the wind is right, you can hear one bar of it, held a little longer than it should be.