Black and grey fine line tattoo of a broomstick with hatched bristles and a bound handle, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Broom tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A broomstick is shown in black ink with fine hatched lines forming the bristles, which spread out to the left. A binding is drawn around the join where the bristles meet the shaft, and the handle tapers to the right. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale inner forearm against a blurred indoor background with green partitions.

Fine line Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never swept the cut. He said the water had its own ideas about tidiness and the towpath had enough of my mother's temper. What he kept was the old birch broom that hung on a nail beside the range, its bristles fanned out like a wet hand, the neck bound in tarred twine where it had split on a gate at Hatchford lock.

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The February I took the boat down alone, the broom rode strapped to the cabin roof with the coal sacks and the spare windlass. At every lock I found myself counting bridges under a sky the colour of wet slate, and wondering whether he had counted them too. At Stanton the lock-keeper's widow, who had known him forty years, took one look at the broom and said he had used it to shift a dead heron off her gate, and that she had never seen him so pleased with anything in his life.

By the time I reached the long pound the frost had settled thick on the roof and the tiller had frozen stiff under my glove. I unlashed the broom and swept the cabin top in long, careful strokes, the bristles hissing over the ice and leaving dark straight lines behind them, the way a pencil leaves a path across a page. The boat moved more easily after that, as if the water had been waiting for someone to ask.

When I tied up in the basin, I stood the broom by the range. It leaned for a while, then settled upright on its own, bristles open to the warmth, and I left it there.