A woman in an inverted yoga pose shows a black vertical tattoo of angular symbols running along her left side ribs.

Vertical symbol tattoo on a side torso

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a headstand wears patterned purple leggings and a dark briefs bottom, with her head and hair resting on a pale wooden floor against a white wall. A vertical tattoo of black, angular symbols or script runs down her left side above the waistband, with fine, even linework. The image is in full colour, but the only colour comes from the leggings, and the tattoo itself is black ink.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the brazier won't hold its heat for a grumbler. Now, you want the tale of the Halloran sisters' wagon, the one with the black writing running down its tall pole? Old Tom Halloran cut those marks himself the year the big top burned at Sheffield. Every sign was a mile of road, he said, and every bend a word you had to read sideways.

Keep reading

Nell Halloran was the only one who would go up on the wagon roof when the wind got in the canvas. The night the fair pitched on the Wolds, the gusts came off the hill like a dog set loose, and the guy ropes started to sing. Her brother Davey, who was seven and couldn't yet make out a line of print, pointed up at the marks and asked what they said. Nell hooked her boots over the gutter, hung upside down from the rail, and read them out to him the way her grandmother had taught her, bottom to top, then turned the whole thing round in her head.

"Ground keeps what it's given," she told him. "Give it your weight and it holds you. Fight it and it throws you."

She stayed up there till the canvas quit flapping. Come morning the wagon had not moved an inch and the pole was still standing, though the sign-painter swore the carved strokes had shifted a quarter turn in the night. Tom just laughed and said the wind had been reading them too.

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