Black tribal tattoo with swirling blade-like linework running from the ribs down the side of the waist to the hip.

Tribal tattoo along the ribs and waist

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tribal design with bold swirls and pointed, thorn-like strokes runs from under the ribs, down the side of the waist and onto the hip. The solid black linework is smooth and even, with the design following the curve of the torso. The photo is a close crop of the torso with a navel piercing and denim shorts visible, and the skin tone is warm against the dark ink.

Ribs Tribal Swirl Thorn Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Fourteenth of January. The snow has been falling since Tuesday and the lane up to the Sloe and Lantern has gone under it, so we are seven guests and one goat in the back kitchen. I am writing this by the lamp because the candles are for the bedrooms now.

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Mr Tulley, who walked up from the Dale with a sack of cuttings on his back, has been carving blackthorn stakes by the fire all evening. He says the hedgers in his valley wind the thorns in long curling strokes so the cattle cannot push through, and that a good hedge is spiky at the joins and sweeps freely between them. He sketched a pattern on the back of the bill of fare: a swirl, a barb, a swirl, a barb, running off the edge of the paper like a stream. I asked what it was for. He said keeping out what you don't want, and letting in the rest.

This morning the drifts reached the first-floor sills. Tulley and the ostler dug a trench from the back door toward the orchard wall, and when they broke through they found an old hedge that had grown up through the snow, its blackthorn bent over in the same curls as his drawing. Nobody here remembers it being planted. Tulley put his hand on a stem, laughed, and said the hedge had been waiting for someone to notice where the path ran.

The road is open by noon. Tulley has left me a stake carved with the swirl and the barb, and a note saying the lane will be clear before the worst of the thaw. I have nailed the stake above the kitchen door. The goat has been very quiet all day.