Black blackwork tattoo of a baseball stitch seam curving around a solid black batter silhouette on home plate, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Baseball stitching and batter logo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a curved baseball seam made of short black stitches wrapping around a solid black silhouette of a batter at home plate. The linework is bold and the black fill is solid and even, with no colour ink. The design fills the frame, with the curve of the seam leading the eye around the central silhouette on the forearm skin.

Blackwork Forearm Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad said a river barge had no use for a cricket bat, so we made do with a baseball my cousin posted from Ohio in a box that smelled of gum. The stitching had come half away by the time it reached our mooring at Hythe Lock, the red thread gone grey, and Dad spent an evening with a bodkin and a tin of tar trying to put it right. He never got the seam back, but he wrapped the ball in twine and said the stitches were the only honest thing about it, because every one of them showed you where it had been.

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The barge was called Patience and she sat low with coal for the Co-op in her hold. On Sunday mornings, before the lock keeper was up, I took the ball to the flat grass by the towpath and pitched it at a square of old tarpaulin Dad had pegged down as home plate. Nobody had told me a batter needed a proper shape, so I drew one in chalk, a little pentagon with its point toward the water, and stood inside it with my elbows up the way I'd seen in a film. The ducks took no interest. A heron once, and only once.

One Sunday a man on a black bicycle stopped at the gate and watched me for a full minute before he spoke. He said I was standing in the wrong box. I told him the box was mine and I'd drawn it myself. He laughed, got off the bike, and sat on the bank, and told me he'd caught for a works team in Dayton before the river took him north, and that the best catchers he ever knew never looked at the ball until it was already in the mitt.

Rain came that week and washed the chalk clean. When I went back, the tarpaulin was still pegged down and the ball had rolled off the edge into the cut, where the current had carried it gently toward the lock. I watched it go. Dad said it would turn up at the weir in a day or two, stitches first, looking exactly as it had when it left Ohio.