Blackwork and red-line sleeve on an upper arm and forearm, with a circular symbol, arrow-like marks and lettering.

Abstract black and red arm sleeve

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sleeve tattoo wraps the upper arm and part of the forearm, with a large circular motif of black shapes and fine red circles near the elbow. Below, arrow-like marks, a band of lettering reading TERRA, and a further geometric band with a red line run down the forearm. The bold black linework is set against a dark backdrop, and the red accents are used sparingly.

Blackwork Lettering Upper arm Forearm Circle Symbol Arrow Lettering Geometric pattern Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife on Carrick Skerry had a habit of counting the boats in by their lamps. Each dusk she climbed the iron stair with a pot of red ochre and a stiff brush, and painted three small arrows on the seaward sill, pointing down to the rocks where the tide ran fastest. The men out of Ardmore said she was marking the safe channel. Her husband said she was marking nothing, that the sill had always been red, and he went to bed before the boats were home.

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The winter the lamp failed, the boats were out past the bar when the fog came down like wet wool. Nobody could see the light and nobody could see the stair. But Ailsa, the keeper's girl, who was nine and too small to be trusted with the oil, took her grandmother's lantern down to the shingle. At the foot of the cliff lay a ring of standing stones that the old people said was older than the tower, and she set the lantern in the middle of it and turned it three times, slow, the way her mother turned the great lens.

Up on the sill, the arrows her mother had painted caught the glow from below and held it, red on the grey glass, pointing down through the murk to the gap in the rocks. The men saw them and steered by them, one boat after another, counting the arrows the way they had always counted the lamps.

In the morning the glass was wet and the word TERRA was scratched across the inside of the lamp housing in a small, careful hand. The keeper stood on the stair a long time looking at it. He said it meant ground, and that was all he would say.