Colour and grey shaded tattoo on the side of the ribs showing a spiralling striped leg, red shoes, a small blue star and sparkles.

Striped legs and red shoes on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded spiral of striped fabric curls up from the lower ribs and ends in a striped leg with a pair of red shoes. A small blue star and scattered sparkles sit beside the shoes. The striped areas use dark and light grey shading, while the shoes and star add the only colour against the skin.

Ribs Star Sparkle Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came off the Thanet flats at half past four on a Tuesday, and by five it had lifted the striped awning clean off Pemberton's Haberdashery and set it spinning over the pier like a loose sail. Nell Gaunt stood in the doorway with a mouthful of pins and watched bolts of ticking unroll across the promenade, past the donkeys and the chip van, towards the grey sea.

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She had been told the shop's lost property box held nothing but umbrellas and a single glove, so she had never bothered to open it. Now, with the till drawer rattling and the dummy in the window already spinning on its stand, she dragged the box across the floor. Under the glove was a pair of red patent shoes with buckles worn pale, and beside them a blue glass star the size of a hen's egg that Mr Pemberton had once sworn was a brooch and once sworn was a bit of a lighthouse lens. She put the shoes on over her wellingtons, which made no sense at all, and clicked her heels twice because it seemed the sort of thing one did.

The awning came down at once, folding itself neatly over the frame as though it had been ironed. The wind dropped to a soft huff. Out on the pier a little cloud of glitter settled over the railings like sugar on a cake, and the donkeys stopped looking up. Nell took the shoes off, rather more carefully than she'd put them on, and set them back in the box.

On Saturday a woman in a yellow mac came in and asked, very politely, whether anybody had handed in a pair of red shoes. Nell wrapped them in tissue, took a pound fifty, and watched the woman tuck the star into her handbag without being asked. Outside, the awning hung perfectly still, and the sky over Margate stayed clear, which Mr Pemberton said was a mercy after the week they'd had.