Upper back tattoo of two lightsabers, one with a metallic hilt and both with red blades and dark smoky shading at the hilts, shown from above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two lightsabers across upper back

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A photograph taken from above of a man's bare upper back, with the top of his head with dark hair visible at the top of the frame. Two lightsabers are tattooed across the back, one angled from the left shoulder blade and one from the right shoulder, with detailed grey shading on the metallic hilts and solid red blades. Dark smoky wisps sit at the hilt ends and the image is lit with a cool, dark background.

Back Lightsaber Hilt Blade Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the two hilts in the bottom of the wardrobe in room four, wrapped in a bath towel that still smells of diesel and brine. Mrs Pargeter has let that room to the same lodger every August for nine years, a retired cable jointer called Ivor who never came down to breakfast before ten and never once asked for the window to be opened. This year there is no card from him, only a month's rent in an envelope on the dresser and a note in careful capitals that says leave it as it is.

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You carry the towel out to the harbour wall, where the wind is coming in off the mud flats hard enough to push the gulls sideways. The hilts are pewter-grey and pitted, the grips wound in old insulation tape, and one end of each is scorched black, as if he held them too close to a bonfire on the sands. Inside the first, the red blade has cracked along its length. The second is whole, and when you hold it up against the low sun the light goes through it like a coal.

Ivor told you once that he and his brother Dennis fought with broom handles on the pier every summer until the day Dennis took the bus to Canada and never wrote back. The trick, Ivor said, was never to swing at the head, only at the shoulder, so the other one had to bring his blade across and meet you halfway. You didn't understand that until now, standing on the wall with a blade in each hand and nobody to cross.

So you do it anyway. You raise the whole one over your right shoulder and the cracked one over your left, and you bring them down so the two red lengths meet in the air above the water, humming the low note Ivor always made. On the sand a man in a yellow jacket stops walking and looks up. You don't wave. You hold the crossing a moment longer, then lower them both and go back inside to write to Canada.