Three things under the floor, one of them a light

An overhead run of floorboards in cream, cut hard, rust nail heads marching down the joist lines. One short board has been lifted out and laid at an angle across its neighbours.

The hole it leaves is the darkest shape on the shirt. Three objects sit in it, drawn in rust outline: a flat round tin, a wad of folded papers, and a small torch on its side.

Nobody who paid for this floor has seen underneath it.

What makes those three objects a complete set?

Something to keep things in, the things themselves, and a light to find them by. There is nothing missing.

That is the whole logic of a cache, arrived at from first principles by people who had never seen one described. The tin is the part that survives dust and damp. The folded papers are what the place exists for. The torch is the admission that the hole is dark and that the hole will be opened in the dark, Xwould not.

Why is the lifted board set down at an angle across the others?

Because that is what a board looks like when somebody is coming straight back.

It has not been propped against a wall, leaned upright or carried out of the room. It is lying flat across its neighbours, one end overhanging, exactly where it landed when it came up — the position you leave something in when the interruption is measured in minutes. A board stood on end means the job is finished. A board dropped across the run means the hole is still in use.

Why is the hole the darkest shape in the print?

Because the design is built around a space you cannot see into, and it would be a weaker picture if you could.

Everything else on the shirt is cream with rust marks. The opening is a solid dark rectangle, and the three objects read as rust outlines floating in it rather than as things lit from above. You get an inventory and no more — no sense of depth, no sense of how much else is down there. That is the same view the person holding the board has, which is to say the correct one.

What do the nail heads tell you?

That this board has come up more than once and gone back each time.

Rust dots run down the boards in regular columns, and the lifted board carries its own set. A board that had been prised up once and abandoned would have splintered ends and missing fixings. This one has been taken out and refitted often enough to have a routine, and the floor closes over it neatly enough that the room reads as ordinary. The kit under it is not a discovery; it is an address.

Do I need permission to print my own floor?

No. A run of softwood boards is a generic piece of construction, and a hiding place two children worked out is theirs and nobody else's.

There is no drawing being copied here, no published work, no mark belonging to a manufacturer. What the design does contain is a real arrangement between two people, which is worth a word with them if they are old enough to have a view — a place stops being a place the moment it is on a shirt. Style has no owner. A particular work does, and floorboards are not one.

Does this work if the place was a loft hatch, or a hedge?

Yes, as long as the picture keeps the two things that make this one work: an opening, and a kit that is complete.

A gap behind a wardrobe, a hollow between a hedge and a fence, a cavity under a stair — each has its own opening and its own way of being closed again, and each takes the same treatment. Something built out of the room's own furniture goes further and becomes a structure rather than a cavity; a place agreed by drawing a boundary instead of finding a gap is the other half of the same instinct.

Isn't a hiding place in your own house something to worry about?

Usually not, and the contents of this one are drawn where you can see them: a tin, some paper, a torch.

What is under the board is nearly always the same category of thing — paper somebody wrote, something small that would be confiscated on sight, an object being held for the other one, which is its own kind of arrangement and gets its own accounting. A place with two keyholders is a working piece of infrastructure between two people. Printing it is not the same as opening it.

Does it print well?

Yes. A woodcut is more or less designed for this — hard edges, two colours, no soft tone anywhere.

Cream and rust on olive is two inks, and the dry-brush breaks in the board grain are large enough to survive the weave rather than filling in and going solid. The dark opening carries as one flat area. The important restraint is in the three objects: they are outlines, and outlines below the fabric's floor disappear, so they want to be drawn coarser and fewer than a pen drawing would be. Olive, dark brown and slate all read as floor timber; a white shirt turns the boards into paper.

How do I get one made?

Describe the place at JustOG — what opens, how it closes again, and the three things that were down there. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The tin is still under there. The batteries in the torch are not.