Black and white photo of a forearm with bold black blackwork bands and thin parallel stripes wrapping around it, with a curved swoosh near the wrist.

Black bands wrapping a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shown from the elbow to the hand against a dark top and a background of leaves. Solid black bands and thinner parallel lines wrap around the forearm at intervals, with a curved, tapering shape near the elbow. The linework is crisp and the tattoo is made only in black ink, with no shading or greys visible on the design.

Blackwork Forearm Stripe Band Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every boat in Skerrow wore its record below the waterline: a black band of pitch for each season it had come home. The tarry rings ran round the hull like the rings of a tree, and the old men could read a boat's luck by counting them up from the keel. When Ilse's father drowned off the Tooth, his boat, the Marrin, was left with four bands and a gap where the fifth should have gone.

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Ilse took the pitch pot down to the slip the morning after the funeral. Nobody stopped her. She had sailed with him since she was nine and knew the stroke the brush needed, long and even, the wrist turning at the end so the line tapered to nothing like a wave going out. But she could not make the fifth band hold. Each time she painted it, the pitch slid back off the grey wood and pooled at the bottom in a thick, sulky line.

Old Tam Gerry, who had mended nets on the quay since before the war, watched her from the rope store for three tides. On the fourth morning he came down with a bundle of sailcloth and his knife. "You're painting it wet," he said. "The wood wants to be dry and the pitch wants to be warm. Wait for the sun to find the hull." She waited. The next afternoon the sun came round the harbour wall and lay flat across the planks, and the band went on clean at both edges.

That evening the Marrin went out with the others. Ilse stood on the quay and counted as the boats turned, four black rings and one new, sharp as a blade. Her mother said nothing and did not need to. The boat would come home or it would not, and the sea kept its own count, but the fifth band was on the hull now, and Ilse had painted it with her own hand.