Fine line cursive script tattoo reading within and without on skin, with a printed book page of text below.

Within and without script lettering

Fine line · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of cursive script on skin reading "within & without", in thin black linework with a looped ampersand. The lower half of the image is a printed page of prose in a serif typeface, set in black on white. The tattoo fills the upper section, with the book page below it in a stacked composition.

Fine line Lettering Script Lettering Ampersand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Adair on the eleventh floor keeps her kettle on until the lift is fixed, which has been since March, and every night at ten she knocks three times on the heating pipe with a teaspoon. Everyone in Hallam House knows the signal. It means she is still there, and it means somebody should answer. I have been answering it from the flat beneath hers for four years, tapping back with the handle of a screwdriver, and neither of us has ever once asked what the other looks like.

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From my kitchen window the block across the road is a grid of lit squares, a hundred small lives stacked like the shelves of a library, and I have been counting them the way other men count sheep. Forty-one yellow windows, most nights. Some flicker with televisions, some stay dark for weeks, and one on the fourth floor belongs to a man who plays the same three bars of a violin until the streetlights go out. I have never met him. I know him better than my brother.

On Tuesday the pipe stayed quiet. At half ten I took the stairs, all twelve flights because the lift was still broken, and found her door open a crack. She was sitting in her good armchair facing the window with the lamp off, and the city was going about its business outside without her.

"I've been in here forty years," she said, "and I've only just noticed I can see the whole street from in here, and the street can see me." She did not turn round. "Sit down, love. You'll be wanting the spoon."

I sat. After a while I knocked on the pipe three times, and from far below us, through the concrete, came three knocks back.