Close photo of a thin black fine line tattoo of a zipper running down the upper arm below a dark t-shirt sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Zip tattoo on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slim black line runs vertically down the upper arm, with a small zip slider near its lower end. The linework is clean and solid with no shading, and the tattoo is set against plain skin and a white background. The image is in natural colour with the black ink as the only ink colour.

Fine line Upper arm Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud,

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You will laugh, but the wall came apart along a line this morning, the way a jacket does when someone has been careless with it. Tomas and I had the scaffold up on the north range, pulling loose the old lime from the gap where the stair meets the chapel, and there, a foot down in the rubble-fill, was a strip of black tape with teeth on it. Brass slider, its pull worn smooth. Nobody in 1400 wore a zip. I checked twice with the chap from the county museum, who said it was a jacket fastener of the kind sold by the gross from about 1930, and that someone must have dropped a coat through the gap when the chapel roof was still on.

Tomas wanted to bin it. I put it in my pocket instead. I have not decided whether it is a joke played on the next century or simply the castle's way of keeping track of what it has swallowed.

What I keep returning to is that the slider still runs. Tomas tried it on the spare sleeve of his coat and it closed the teeth clean from hem to collar, no catch, no grit, as if the wall had been waiting for something to hold it shut again.

We cap the gap with lime tomorrow. I will leave the pull on the sill of the window where you used to read to me, so you can see it when you come up in June.

Love, Ruth