Black and white photo of two small fine line rune tattoos on the side of two fingers, one a chevron shape and one a cross-barred symbol.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small rune tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with two small black rune-like symbols, one on the upper joint of the middle finger and one on the adjacent finger. The lines are thin, crisp and uniform, with no shading. The image is greyscale, with a wooden floor and a silver ring in the background.

Fine line Hand Rune Chevron Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the radiator, you're letting the draught in and the lift's already sulking. Right, the story of the flats on the eleventh floor, the ones they knocked down in the spring. Mind your tea.

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Ada Penrose lived on the eleventh floor with a tin of coloured pencils and no fear of heights. In the winter of 1974 the council sent a lift man called Gordon Pike, who came with a flask and a notebook full of marks his Orkney grandfather had taught him. Gordon chalked two shapes on the steel of the lift doors while Ada watched. The first was a chevron, a roof lying on its side. The second was a crossed gate, a door you could walk through from either direction. 'Keeps a thing standing,' he said, and he didn't explain, because men like Gordon never did.

Three weeks later the lift stopped between the seventh and eighth floors with Ada inside and a boy from flat 4B clutching a bag of shopping. The light flickered, the cable groaned, and the boy started counting bricks through the grille. Ada didn't count. She pressed her thumb against the chalk gate, which had faded to a grey smudge, and told him about the harbour at Stromness, where her mother kept a boat with marks like these painted on its bow. The boy asked whether the marks worked. Ada said they didn't need to work, only to be believed in for an hour.

The engineers arrived at dawn and the doors slid open onto the seventh floor as if nothing had happened. Gordon's chevron was still there, pointing up, and the gate beside it had been scratched deeper by somebody's keys. Ada never learned whose. The block is rubble now and the view from the eleventh floor is only sky, but I still look for those two marks every time I step into a lift, and I've never once been let down.