Black linework tattoo of three chairs stacked down the side of the ribs, a wooden-framed chair at the top, a tubular sling chair in the middle and a wire chair below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three chairs along the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three separate chair designs are drawn in black outline and arranged vertically along the side of a torso. The top chair has a wooden-style frame, the middle one has a tubular frame with a sling seat, and the bottom one is a wire mesh chair. The linework is even and unshaded, and the ink is black on skin with no colour.

Fine line Ribs Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okafor had been dead nine days when Dennis and I were sent to empty the second floor of Brindle's Interiors on Commercial Street. The instructions were on a clipboard: skip, skip, skip, and one line in biro that said Keep nothing. We carried out a dining table with a cracked top, forty boxes of brass door handles, and a bookcase that smelled of pipe smoke. In the corner by the lift sat three chairs that nobody had thought to price.

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The first was a plain wooden thing with a back like an open book, its legs splayed as if it had been caught mid-argument. The second had a tube of steel bent into a frame, with a canvas sling pulled so tight across it that it could have passed for a drum. The third was almost nothing: a wire basket of a seat, a wire back, four thin legs that looked as though they might fold up and walk off. Dennis wanted all three in the skip. I said the skip was for things that were finished, and these were not.

We took them down to the van. I sat in the wire one on the pavement while Dennis smoked, and the wire gave under me the way a good net does, holding without seeming to hold on. It was the first chair I had ever liked. Dennis said it looked like a shopping trolley that had given up. I said that was the point of it, and he didn't ask what I meant.

That evening I drove them to my sister's flat in Armley, where they stand now in a row by her window like three guests who arrived early for a party nobody has finished planning. Nobody has sat in the wooden one since. Last Sunday she sat in the wire one, and it sang under her like a plucked string, and she laughed and wouldn't get up.