Two forearms resting on a cream rug, each with abstract tattoos of thin black lines, a teal band and a bold black stroke across the forearm.

Abstract bands and lines on two forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms lie side by side on a cream fluffy rug, wearing several beaded and braided bracelets. The left arm has a thin black arc, a teal brushed band and a thick black stroke wrapping around the forearm, while the right arm has crossing thin black lines, a single teal arc and small ink dots. The linework is loose and painterly with soft edges and visible variation in ink density, and the image is slightly warm and faded in tone.

Forearm Brush stroke Band Stripe Arc Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Fenwick had the sign-writing shed above the harbour at Staithes, and she never let anyone touch her sable brushes but me. That June the Gannet came in with her transom cracked, and the owner wanted her name back in gold leaf before the regatta. Mabel took one look at the new board and told me to stop lettering and go down to the slip for the colour of the water at the turn of the tide.

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I went with a jam jar and a rag and came back with that green-blue on my cuffs. She laughed and said it was no use to a boat, then took the jar and painted a single arc across the board, quick and loose, the way the swell lifts a hull and lets it down. She painted a second arc, and a third, until the wood looked like a page of someone's sums that had got away from them. Where the strokes crossed, she let the ink pool and dry dark, and she flicked little dots off the tip of the brush like spray.

The owner came back on Friday and stood in the doorway a long time. He said he had asked for his boat's name. Mabel said she had given him the sea it would have to carry it across. He paid her double and never asked again.

The board hung in the Gannet's wheelhouse for thirty years, and nobody on the crew could read it. Men who had sailed past worse weather said that was the only one they trusted.