Colour tattoo of a baseball seam shaped like a home plate, with red stitching and soft blue and orange shading, on the lower leg above a grey sock with purple trim.

Baseball seam tattoo on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a baseball seam drawn as a pentagon, with two curved rows of red stitching crossing its pale grey and blue surface. Soft orange and blue washes give the leather a loose, painterly look, with dark outlines around the edges. It sits on the front of the lower leg above a grey sock with a purple band, against a plain skin background.

Calf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had painted home plate on the Ashby Road ground for nineteen summers, and every Saturday morning he still checked the corners with a tape measure before he let anyone near it. The pentagon was seventeen inches on each side, or it was meant to be. Over the years the rain had nibbled at one point and the mower had clipped another, so he had learned to keep the lines honest by eye and by habit.

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The new coach, a woman from the council who had never held a bat in anger, wanted the pitch lit for the Friday league. Dennis told her the lights would only show up the cracks. She said the lights were already bought. He said nothing, went to the shed, and came back with a tin of white marking paint and a stiff brush that smelled of turpentine.

On the third coat he noticed the girl who had been sitting on the bleachers all morning, stitching a red ribbon through the holes of her old glove with a darning needle. She had watched him the whole time. When he finally stood up, knees cracking, she asked him whether home plate was the only bit of the ground that was ever really finished.

He thought about it while the paint dried. "Finished?" he said. "No. It just gets handed over every week, dirtier than it was." She nodded as though that were the answer she had wanted, and went back to her stitching, one loop of red at a time, until the sun dropped low enough to make the white corners glow.