Standing legs with solid black blackwork tattoos in geometric bands and thin outlined panels from thigh to ankle, shown against a plain wall.

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Blackwork leg tattoo with geometric bands

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a standing person from the waist down, wearing dark shorts. The left leg is covered in solid black ink from thigh to ankle, broken by a pale horizontal band at the knee and another near the ankle. The right leg has thin outlined lines running down the thigh and shin, with black rectangular blocks on the lower leg separated by pale gaps.

Blackwork Geometric Thigh Calf Ankle Band Line Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The causeway at Hask had been laid by my grandmother's grandmother, and the Harbourmaster swore every stone of it was quarried from the black ridge above the salt pans. He was wrong about one thing. The stone was not black when it came out of the ground. We soaked each course in lamp oil and soot for a month before it would take the dark, and the pale gaps between the bands were left bare on purpose, so that the sea could read where to put its feet.

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I was apprenticed to the mason who kept the sluice gates, and he taught me to count the courses by touch. Solid black for the long run, then a hand's width of bare lime, then black again. He said the old kings wanted the road to look like a ladder laid on its side. I said it looked like a row of shut doors. He laughed until he coughed and told me doors were only ladders that had given up.

In the spring of the flood year the lower bands cracked, and I was sent down the causeway with a plumb line and a lantern. I found the crack where two black blocks had slid apart over the pale seam, and the water had already begun to pour through it. I pressed my palm against the wet stone and felt the whole structure hum, the way a bell hums after the clapper has stopped.

I packed the gap with clay and hauled a single block back into place with rope and two boys from the ferry. By dusk the water had dropped to a trickle. The Harbourmaster crossed at midnight with a lamp, and he stopped at my seam and said nothing for a long time. Then he asked me how I had known where the weight would fail. I told him the truth: I had not known. I had only counted the pale gaps and trusted them.