Two forearms with black bands separated by bare skin, and dotwork stippling fading toward the wrist, in a blackwork and dotwork style on the forearm.

Banded forearms with dotwork fade

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two forearms, each with two solid black bands encircling the arm with a strip of bare skin between them. Below the upper band, the ink breaks into fine dots that become sparser toward the wrist, creating a gradient. The ink is black and grey, and the composition is a close, softly blurred shot against a colourful striped fabric.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Band Stripe Dot Stippling Gradient

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie had repainted the gauge boards on the harbour wall every spring since her husband's hands stiffened too much to hold the brush. The top band, black as a rook's wing, marked the spring high water. The white strip beneath it was the neap line, and the second black band was the low. Below that, where the stone met the sea only on the very lowest tides, she had taught herself to stipple.

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Dot by dot, the spray from each January gale had written itself into the masonry, thick near the high band and thinning as the eye dropped toward the slipway, until the last specks were barely more than a bloom of damp. Nobody had asked her to paint them. The printed chart in the glass case at the chandlery left the spray out entirely, and Marjorie had always thought the chart lied by omission.

In October a young surveyor from the county came with a laser level and a clipboard. For two days he crouched on the weed-slick steps, measuring, and said nothing about the dots. On the third morning he found her at the bottom of the slipway with a pot of paint and a fine sable brush, and he watched her work without speaking until the light went.

"Your bands sit a sixteenth out from the 1952 datum," he said at last. "Which one should I put in the report?"

She dipped the brush and set one more dot where the gradient ran out, small as a full stop. "The one the sea agrees with," she said, and went on painting the wall a little longer.