Black and grey outline tattoo on an upper arm showing two spiky-haired animated characters in an arched frame beneath a cloudy sky and a dark silhouetted city.

Two animated characters in an arched frame on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two spiky-haired animated characters face each other in a pointed arched frame, with a cloudy sky, a distant mountain and a black silhouetted city behind them. The fine outlines are solid and even, with shading applied to the figures' clothing and the lower border motifs. The design is entirely black and grey and fills most of the upper arm.

Upper arm Character City Cloud Mountain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, you lot at the back, stop passing the sherry round like it's the collection plate and listen. I'll tell it proper this time, because I told it wrong at the last reunion. Forty years ago the chapel at Harrowgate Grammar had a pointed arch of stained glass over the door, and in it was a city nobody in our year had ever seen, black towers against a pale sky with clouds drifting over the top. Every boy in the fifth form swore it was a real place. Two of them went looking.

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Their names were Davey Quill and Ash Mortlock, and between them they had one thing: a long iron key the groundsman kept locked in the boiler room, which Davey carried over his shoulder like a shepherd's crook. They walked past the playing fields, over the stile and up onto the moor where the clouds sat so low you could touch them. By the afternoon they reached the city. It was not glass and it was not towers. It was the spoil heaps of the old pit, black and jagged, with the sun going down behind them, and the two of them stood there arguing about who should go in first.

Ash said the key was his because he'd found it. Davey said the key had chosen him, and nobody had the sense to laugh. In the end they left it standing upright in the gravel at the pit gate, and they walked back to Harrowgate in different directions and never spoke of it again.

Last month the groundsman's grandson sent me a photograph of that key, still rusted upright in the same gravel. So raise your glasses to the pair of them. They never got inside that city, but they've been facing each other across this hall for forty years, and tonight, for the first time, they're both in the room.