Fine line black tattoo of angular symbols resembling a G, a greater-than sign, a caret and a V, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Angular symbols on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo on the outer upper arm, showing a G, a greater-than sign, an upward caret and a V set in a row. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as solid black against lighter skin. The image is cropped tightly around the tattoo on a plain background, with the design sitting centrally.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now mind, I'm only telling it the way Old Sal told it to me, and she had it from her grandad who worked the locks on the cut, so take the bones and leave the gristle. Sit closer. The river doesn't like to be talked over.

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Every boat that came down the cut in those years carried a stub of chalk in the wheelhouse. Not for writing names. For marking the gates. A G for the gate, you see, and then the way the water wanted to go. A greater-than sign for a boat running with the current, pointing on to the next lock. An upward caret when the level had to come up, and a V when it had to go down, like a sigh let out slowly. Four little marks, and a bargee could read a whole flight of locks without a word said.

Sal's grandad had a lad called Tom Hobday who was useless with a windlass but a wonder with the chalk. The lock-keeper's wife at Brackenhall wanted him gone within the week. He went up and down that flight so many times he learned every mark by heart, and when the floods came the winter after, the signs on the stones were under brown water and nobody could find the true cut. Tom waded it anyway, counting the marks off on his own knuckles, and brought the barge through without a scratch.

They say he never once wrote his own name on anything. When Sal asked him why, he tapped the top of his arm and said a man ought to carry his directions where the wet can't wash them off. She never did say whether he meant it as a joke. I always thought he did.