Close photo of a fine line black tattoo of angular geometric letter-like symbols on the inner forearm, in a Lettering and Geometric style.

Angular symbols on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of angular, letter-like symbols sits on the inner forearm of a person wearing a white top. The linework is thin and even, with sharp corners and open strokes, and the shapes are set in a single horizontal line across the skin. The ink is solid black against a plain, softly lit background, and the image is shot close and straight on.

Fine line Lettering Geometric Forearm Letter Symbol

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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

Now then, sit yourself down on that coil of rope, because the lock won't fill for another ten minutes and I'll not tell this one standing. Old Nan Halloran worked the Sallow Cut for forty-one years, and she never once wrote a word in ink. She cut her marks instead, little angled strokes with a bargeman's knife into the oak of the top gate, one set for every boat that came through on the turn of the tide. Nobody could read them but her, and she said that was the point.

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Her husband Tom had drowned below the weir in the wet winter, the year the river came up over the towpath. After that she cut one mark more than the others, a shape like a hook laid on its side with a bar across it, and she would put her palm flat on it before she opened the paddles. The lock hands thought it was grief. The boatmen thought it was luck. Her granddaughter Bea, nine years old and sharp as a fish hook, asked what it said.

Nan told her it said where the water was going, and that a body only had to know which way that was to stop fighting it. Bea didn't believe her, so one July night she took the knife down to the gate and cut the mark herself, a little crooked, and the river took the lower paddle and nearly had her after it.

Nan hauled her out by the collar. Then she sat in the wet grass and laughed until she cried, and that was the first time anyone had seen her do either since Tom went under.