Close-up of a solid black geometric band tattoo with triangles, zigzags and fringed lines wrapping the forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black geometric band on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wide band of black geometric motifs wraps the forearm, built from stacked triangles, a zigzag line and rows of chevrons ending in small dots. The linework is solid and bold, with no shading or colour. The hand rests on a hip in the lower frame, and the background is softly blurred.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been told the pattern would take a week, and it took her eleven days, because the band kept refusing to lie flat on the loom. Her aunt Morag had woven bands for the ferry crews on Harris for forty years and never once let a thread go slack. "Count the heddles aloud," she said, "and the cloth will count you back."

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The design was a stepped triangle at each end, a zigzag running the length of it like a fence seen from a moving train, and below them rows of chevrons that dropped small knots of wool at the edge where the warp ran out. Morag called the knots the rain. Every evening Nell tied off one more row, and every evening the light through the byre door lay a little further across the floor, like someone measuring.

On the twelfth morning the band came off the loom and lay on the table, and it was wider than the pattern card by a finger's breadth. Nell had miscounted the second triangle. She reached for the unpicker, then stopped, because the mistake ran straight into the zigzag and made it look like a tide coming in over stone.

Morag picked it up, turned it once in the window, and wound it twice round her own wrist. "Leave it," she said. "Nobody sees a pattern properly until it's been worn a bit wrong."

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