Close photo of a black ink tattoo of three stacked symbols, a comb, a heart-shaped spiral and an abstract figure, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three stacked symbols on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three solid black symbols are stacked vertically on the side of the torso, with a comb-like shape at the top, a heart-shaped spiral in the middle and an abstract figure below. The lines are bold and fairly uniform with solid fill, and the tattoo is centred on the ribs against plain skin. The photograph is taken at a slight angle under indoor lighting, with a blue strap and grey fabric visible at the edges.

Ribs Heart Spiral Symbol Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The odum wood had sat in the shed since the last rains, and I was still picking bark from the block when Kofi came up the track from the road with his bag over one shoulder and his face already sorry. "The bus left without me," he said. "And the money went with it." I didn't look up. A comb is mostly about its teeth, and teeth want patience, which he had not yet learned from me.

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He had been with me three seasons, long enough to space the teeth evenly but not long enough to stop rushing the curve of the heart. I showed him again how to draw the spiral freehand, the line starting thin at the crown and thickening as it coils down, the way a vine climbs a fence post. He tried twice and spoiled both. The third time his hands were steady, and I told him so, which I think surprised us both.

When the comb was nearly done he took a folded paper from his shirt. It was a sketch in pencil of a bird standing on one leg, its head turned right round to look at its own back. "Under the heart," he said. "Where the spiral ends. Could you cut that?" I told him the bird was the hard part, that a head turned like that splits easily along the grain. He said he knew, and that was why he had asked me and not the boy from the next village.

I took the nail and the small gouge and worked the bird in three days, with the rain coming and going on the tin roof. When I finished, I blew the dust out of its eye and held the comb up to the doorway. The light caught the bird's eye for the first time, and Kofi, who had been sitting on the step pretending not to watch, got up and took it from my hand without a word.