Black blackwork winged ornament tattoo across the lower back above a grey wrap skirt, with a small line of script on the thigh.

Winged design across lower back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a person's back and upper thighs wearing a grey high-waisted wrap skirt. A symmetrical black winged design with detailed linework spans the lower back, and a small line of thin black script sits on the upper thigh. The image is in black and grey tones against a plain light background, with the skin tones of the body showing clearly.

Blackwork Lettering Back Thigh Wing Ornament Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the Hollin Gate inn on the third day of the drifts, when the road has vanished under white and the lamp above the door is the only thing that still knows where the world ends. The landlady, Mrs Ada Pell, takes your wet coat without a word and hangs it by the range, where the steam rises like breath.

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Nobody else is stranded there but a travelling clockmaker and a girl who sits at the window counting flakes against the glass. Each evening the clockmaker winds the tall case clock in the back room, and each evening the pendulum seems to slow, as if it too is waiting for the thaw. You notice the moths first. Dozens of them are pinned in a frame above the bar, their wings opened flat, black edges worked with fine ink veins that look almost like lace.

On the fourth night Ada tells you where they came from. Her husband gathered them off the chapel roof in the winter of the great frost, when the candles would not stay lit and the moths crept in from the cold to die beside the hearth. He used to say each pair of wings was a page of a letter nobody had posted. You laugh, and she doesn't.

When the snowplough finally grinds up the valley, the frame is leaning against the door with one moth gone and a fresh pin bright in the wood. Ada is already counting coins at the bar. Cold air slides under the door and settles on your sleeve, and when you brush it away there is only a faint grey dust, the colour of ash, and the clock in the back room ticking again.