Fine line tattoo of three short vertical strokes on the upper back, near the shoulder and base of the neck.

Three vertical lines on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a person's upper back and neck, with dark hair pulled up at the top of the frame. A small tattoo of three thin, evenly spaced vertical black lines sits on the skin to the right of the shoulder blade. The soft, blurred background is dark and the skin is pale, so the black ink stands out as the main point of the composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the wind off the cutting carries the bad parts away if you let it. You want to know about Ruth Pennock and the door of the signal box at Carrow Junction. Every night that winter she took a nail from her apron and scratched marks into the wood beside the lever frame. Three upright strokes, evenly spaced, the way a careful woman counts out change. Trains through the fog, she said, and nothing else.

Keep reading

The porters thought it was a hobby, like knitting. By February the wood beside the levers was full, so she started on the back of the door. Nobody asked her why she never crossed a stroke through, not until the night a lad from the goods yard asked her straight. She set her lamp down on the frame and told him the three lines were for the three men lost on the 9.40 in the cutting in 1931. The fourth line was for whoever she would have to tell about it. She had never once managed to draw it.

So the lad picked up the nail. You'd think he'd have made a joke of it, but he didn't. He drew the fourth stroke slantwise across the other three, the way you'd latch a gate, and then he said the signal could go to clear now. Ruth walked home along the sleepers and slept until noon for the first time in years.

The door's still there, if you ever pass the junction. Three lines and a bar across them, worn almost smooth by hands that wanted to touch it.

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