Blackwork armband tattoo of stacked chevron bands on a forearm, photographed on a blurred city street.

Black chevron band on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black band of stacked chevron and wave shapes wraps around the inside of a forearm, with thin skin-coloured gaps separating the bands. The linework is bold and flat with no shading, and the ink is entirely black against the skin. A blurred city street and pedestrians fill the background, and their faces are not visible.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Armband Chevron Wave Band Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp room smelled of paraffin and wet wool when the relief boat failed to come for the third day running. Ada Pell climbed the iron stairs with a tin of black enamel under one arm, because her father had always painted the stripes after a bad blow, and the rule on Gannet Skerry was that you kept the rules even when nobody was left to read them.

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Her father's bands ran round the gallery rail, one chevron for every gale he had outlasted, stacked like the folded edges of a sail. The lower ones had gone grey under years of salt. She counted them with a fingertip as she worked the brush, pulling each stroke down so the thin gaps of bare paint showed between: a wave, a wave, then a notch where the spray had come over in the winter of the cutter wreck.

The wind backed in the afternoon and the sea went the colour of slate. Out past the reef a small light bobbed that was not hers to answer, a fishing boat with its own lamp and its own stubborn crew. She lit the great lens at dusk regardless. Through the glass the water lifted in long, patient folds and fell again, and she thought her father would have called it steady.

When the relief boat finally came, Harold Greig stepped onto the landing, looked at the rail and said nothing about the enamel on her fingers. She had painted one band that was not a chevron at all, a plain flat stripe, level as the horizon. Greig touched it with a gloved hand and asked whether the kettle was on. Ada said it was, and that it had been on for three days, which was the only honest answer the rock had ever taught her.