Traditional style tattoo on the back of a hand showing a grey umbrella with yellow lightning bolts and blue raindrops, inside a circle of black lettering that reads you are the smell before the rain.

Umbrella and lightning with quote on the hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey umbrella with dark outlines and shading, struck by yellow lightning bolts and falling blue raindrops. Black block lettering inside a circular arrangement reads YOU ARE THE SMELL BEFORE THE RAIN. The bold outlines and flat colour fills are shown on the back of the hand, photographed straight on against a plain skin background.

Traditional Hand Umbrella Lightning Raindrop Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 17:42 has been held outside Stafford for twenty minutes, and you have been standing under the canopy on platform four long enough to learn the station's small noises: the tick of the departures board, a crisp packet skidding along the yellow line, the tannoy apologising in a voice that never sounds sorry. Beyond the fence the sky over the car park has gone the colour of wet slate, and the air tastes faintly of pennies.

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Beside you a porter called Dessie leans on his broom and nods at the clouds. "You are the smell before the rain, that's what my mam always said." He says it the way other men mention the weather. "Smell comes first, then the sky opens, then everybody remembers they forgot their brolly." You laugh, because you did forget yours, and because the first fat drops hit the canopy just then with a sound like knuckles on a drum.

Lightning walks across the far side of the valley, yellow and jagged, and the whole platform flinches together. Strangers who a minute ago were scowling at their phones turn their faces up. A woman in a navy mac snaps open a black umbrella, and its spokes catch the light before the wind turns it inside out. Dessie chuckles, unlocks the lost property cupboard and hands you a grey umbrella with a bent rib and a crook handle worn pale by somebody else's grip.

The train pulls in with its lights already burning, steaming through the downpour like something that has been waiting for permission. You step under the borrowed canopy and it drips onto your collar. You do not mind. The metallic sharpness still hangs in the air, and you understand now what it promised: the worst of it is either over or about to start, and either way you are going to get soaked.