Black and grey photograph of a bold tribal-style symbol tattoo on the nape of a woman's neck, with her hand resting on her shoulder.

Tribal symbol on the nape

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark hair pulled up is photographed from behind, showing a bold black tattoo on the back of her neck. The design is a stylised tribal-like symbol built from tapering curved blades and a looped element, with solid black ink and clean edges. The soft, bright backlight fades the background to white, and her hand with a thin ring rests at the edge of the frame.

Neck Hand Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs shed at Ferrybridge Crossing smelled of hot rubber and wet wool, and the stamp that mattered hung on a nail behind the counter, where anyone could see it but nobody could touch it. I cut that stamp myself the winter the old inspector's eyes gave out. Three tapering blades swept up from a single spine, and through the middle sat a loop like a closed eye, so that every paper it touched was looked at by something that never blinked, as he liked to say.

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Yasmin Oddie came to me with a bundle of ferry permits and a request I should have refused. She wanted the loop left open. Open, she said, so a man could see out. I told her a seal with a gap was a forgery waiting to happen, and she laughed and said every honest seal has a gap somewhere, you only need to know where. She paid in cigarettes and a tin of pear drops, and she came back each Thursday for a fortnight to watch me file the blades down.

On the last Thursday she didn't come. The boat from the far bank docked anyway, and a boy in a borrowed coat handed me a sealed envelope with the loop pressed into the wax, the gap cut exactly where she had said it would be. Inside was a single permit, stamped and dated for that morning, made out to nobody I knew.

I still hang the stamp on its nail. Every morning I hold it up to the window and check that the gap is still there, because I have come to think it is the only honest thing in the building.