Black and grey tattoo of two ornate swords with tassel hilts on the side of the ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ornate swords with tassels on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large sword with a decorated hilt and tassel runs diagonally down the side of the torso, with a smaller ornate blade and winged hilt beside it. The linework is dark and clean, with grey shading along the blades and soft grey tones on the hilt details. The image is a close side view of the ribs, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and the top edge cut off.

Ribs Sword Dagger Tassel Hilt Wing Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, before the sausage rolls go cold. Brian, put that glass on a coaster, this is the sports hall with the bunting still up. I'm going to tell it the way Mr Ashdown told it to us, standing where the wall bars used to be, and nobody interrupts an old woman with a walking stick.

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Ashdown kept two blades on iron hooks behind the vaulting horse. The long one was a cavalry sabre with a brass hilt gone the colour of weak tea, and a tassel of red silk knotted at the pommel. The short one was narrower, with a guard worked like a pair of silver wings and its own tassel, frayed down to threads. Nobody was allowed to touch them. Everybody did.

One wet Thursday in March, Dennis Coyle, who could not win a bout to save his life, lifted both from their hooks and carried them down to the boiler house to practise. He came back up the stairs with the short blade snapped at the tang and the long one bent like a hockey stick. He swore the swords had quarrelled over him. Ashdown only laughed and said the long blade had always wanted a better partner.

He hung them back on the hooks that afternoon, tassels and all. I saw them again years later, in the county museum, under glass, with a card that said Fencing Club, c. 1958. Dennis is in the front row, so you can all stop pretending you weren't looking at him. Look at him go red.