Black and grey geometric symbol tattoo on a finger of a hand, with a partial curved tattoo visible at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract symbol on a finger

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand in black and white showing a small abstract symbol tattoo made of tapered solid shapes and short bars, set along a finger. A partial curved line tattoo is visible at the top left, cut off by the frame. The fine, even linework and solid black fills sit against a pale towel, with the focus on the finger.

Geometric Hand Dashes Curved line

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ossie Threlkeld meets the boat on the landing ledge with one glove on and the other tucked under his arm, and he doesn't look at you while he hands over the ring of keys, telling you the third step is worn to glass and to mind it. Behind him the lamp is already turning, its beam sliding across the wet rock in the same slow sweep it has made every night since before either of you was born. He says Amos Pell died in March, in the chair by the stove, and that the logbook is on the shelf where Amos left it, open at the last page.

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The page is covered in pencil. Most of it is weather and the times of the tides, but down the margin, again and again, Amos drew the same small mark: two tapered strokes, one above the other, with short bars strung between them like the rungs of a ladder. Ossie says it's nothing, just Amos doodling to pass the hours. You turn the pages back and the mark is there in every month, sometimes beside the fishing days, sometimes beside days when nothing came in at all.

That night the Cordelia is late, and you stand at the gallery rail with a shuttered hand lamp and do what the page seems to ask. Two long, a bar, two short. Out in the dark, after a wait long enough to doubt yourself, a light answers from the cove with the same two long and the same bars, and then the boat noses round the stack with its engine idling and its crew shouting up at you as if you were family.

In the morning you pencil the mark under Amos's last entry, beside the date, and then, because it seems the right thing to do, you add a small line of your own beneath it.