Black and grey photograph of a blackwork chevron armband tattoo wrapped around a forearm, with a blurred street behind.

Chevron band tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black band encircles the forearm, with three stripes of bare skin cutting through it in an upward chevron pattern. The lines are bold and clean, with the solid black areas making up most of the design. The photograph is black and grey, taken outdoors with a shallow depth of field that blurs the street and pedestrians behind.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Armband Chevron Stripe Band Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Carrow road on the Tuesday, and by Thursday the only lights on the pass were the ones in our kitchen window. Mrs Haskell arrived at dusk with a mule, a leather satchel and a cough she would not discuss, and asked for the room over the stables because it was warmest. My mother gave her a key and a bowl of broth, and I went out to check the drift poles before the wind got up.

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There were nine of them along the verge, black-painted larch with three bands of bare wood cut into each top, so carters could read the depth from the inn window. My father had painted them every autumn for thirty years. Since his funeral I had been doing it myself, badly, and the black kept running where I had not let it dry. When I reached the ninth pole the snow was already at its third chevron, and I stood there with the brush dripping and understood he had never finished that one at all.

I went back in and found the ledger on the shelf above the cheese. Beside each pole's name he had written the year the snow reached it. Eight entries had dates. The ninth said only: leave it. Mrs Haskell was awake when I brought the book up, sitting by the stove with her hands around a cup. She read the page and laughed until she had to stop coughing. "Your father," she said, "was always certain the road would keep."

In the morning the wind had dropped and the pass lay white and level to the rail. I took the brush out once more and painted the ninth pole black from its base up to the third chevron, leaving the three stripes of bare wood above it. Then I wrote the date beneath his line in my own hand, so whoever came up the road next would know exactly where the snow had stopped.