Woman in a backbend handstand in a timber attic, showing a small black fine line tattoo running down her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Backbend handstand with small arm tattoo

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a sports bra and patterned shorts holds a backbend handstand on a wooden floor, with one leg raised high toward a window. A small, thin black tattoo runs vertically along her upper arm, with fine lines and marks visible at this size. The image is mostly warm natural light and blue-painted A-frame walls, with a yellow surfboard and a patterned mat in the background.

Fine line Upper arm Woman Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The notches start at the height of my father's shoulder and climb the blue boards of the loft like a ladder nobody climbs. Every spring tide he cut one with the back of a chisel, a short stroke for the ordinary ones and a longer one for the big swells that came in off the Atlantic and took the corner of the breakwater in 1979.

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I took the knife from the hook when his hands got too unsteady for the planer. Nobody in Porthgwidden asked me to. They only came up the lane with blanks to be shaped, left them in the yard with a nod, and I learned the shape of a board from the feel of its rails under my palm long before I learned to read the marks on the wall.

Ruth came in the autumn with a sack of wax and a mouth full of questions. She was quick with a plane and quicker with a joke, and on her first morning she asked why the wall looked scratched like a prisoner's cell. I told her it was a tally of the sea. She laughed, then stopped, because she had seen the last few cuts, the ones I had made with a shaking blade, and understood they were about my father.

On the morning she drove off to Newquay with her own rails and a van full of blanks, I stood on the ladder and cut one more. It was a small one, a ripple, nothing to speak of. I wanted the wall to show that someone had been paying attention, and that the sea had been generous enough to leave a little behind.