Black ink tattoo of a vertical line with stacked loops, a spiral and dots, centred on the back of a neck in a black and grey photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Unalome-style line tattoo on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical black tattoo sits centred on the back of a neck, resembling an unalome. It is made of a dotted line rising from the top, stacked loops in the middle, and a teardrop-shaped outline containing a spiral, finished with a loop and a dot at the base. The linework is bold, even and solid black with no shading, and the black and grey photograph is framed tightly on the neck with the ears visible at the edges.

Neck Unalome Spiral Loop Dot Line Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The last goods train was still shunting when Pargeter sent the lad up to the signal box with the chalk tin, so I have the lamp-room floor to myself and a cup of tea going cold beside the ledger. You'll laugh, but he has been drawing the sidings on the boards again, and this time it is the shape from the postcard you pinned over my bunk last winter: one line climbing out of the dark, then the track knotting itself into loops, then a teardrop of rail round the turntable pit with a little spiral at its heart.

He says the dots are the lamp posts, one every hundred yards from the junction gate up to the platform ends, and that the loops are where the wagons wait for their turn to be sorted. Nobody can say who laid it out that way. The company plans show a plain double track, but the men who came over from the old Midland line call the knotted part the Tangle and won't work a shift on it after dark without a second lamp. I thought it was superstition until I stood in the pit myself and watched the engine come round in a slow circle, the driver's face lit orange from the firebox, as if the whole yard were winding a single thread back onto a spool.

The last dot sits at the buffer stop, past the final rail, and Pargeter insists that is where the line truly ends and the ground begins. I told him that seemed a poor place to put a dot. He only shrugged and wiped the chalk on his sleeve.

I've left the tin on the shelf for you. If you come up on Thursday's milk train, look for the drawing before the rain gets to it. It won't last long, and I'd like you to see it while it's still plain.

Yours, Harriet