Close-up of an ear with a small black tattoo of three parallel lines on the upper helix, worn beside silver stud and chain earrings.

Three-line tattoo on the upper ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a woman's right ear, shown in profile with dark hair falling behind it. A small black tattoo of three short parallel lines sits on the upper helix, beside silver circle studs and a silver bar and chain earring on the lobe. The image is warm-toned and softly lit against a pale background, with the tattoo lines crisp and the skin texture visible.

Other Ear Line Tattoo Earring Chain Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, now, and hush while I tell it, because my mother had it from her own grandmother, who swore she was standing at the top of the hill that day. Up above Cwm Farthing the pit took three men in the wet spring, and the colliery office sent a clerk up the valley with a ledger and a face like cold porridge. He wrote their names. He did not write the fourth, which was Idris Pugh's boy, Tomos, who had gone down as a lad to fetch a dropped tin and never came up to be counted.

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Tomos's mother would not have it. Every morning she went to the lamp-room door and scratched three short lines into the lintel with her hairpin, one for each man on the paper and the boy off it. Every morning the wives who had no time for grief that could not pay the rent scrubbed them away with a wet rag. She went on scratching. By August the wood above the door was grey with lines like the tracks of a hen in the mud.

The turn came at the harvest fair, when the clerk came back up with his wife, a thin woman in a grey coat who stopped under the lintel and read it aloud. She counted the marks with one gloved finger, slowly, the way you count coins you suspect are short. Then she asked the room who Tomos was, and nobody answered, so she told them herself, in a voice that carried right down to the chapel. The clerk's ledger was never opened on that matter again.

The lintel is still there, though the pit is shut and the door hangs off its hinge. Go and look if you doubt me. Count the three lines, and then count the one who was never written down. Mind your step on the way out.