Black and grey fine line tattoo of a city skyline with a tall spired skyscraper, on the inside of a wrist beside a braided bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

City skyline on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skyline of tall buildings, including one tall spired skyscraper at the centre, is drawn in thin black linework with light grey shading. The design sits on the inner wrist, with a braided bracelet above it and a tattoo machine resting on a wooden surface to the left.

Fine line Forearm Skyline City Skyscraper Building Spire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spire was the problem. Everything else on the commission had come easily: the squat brick warehouses, the rain-dark glass, the water tower Mr Okonedo's grandfather had insisted on. But the tall needle at the centre kept leaning when I glued it, however carefully I pressed the balsa against the square, and by Thursday the client was ringing the shop every afternoon to ask why his city looked drunk.

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I had the drawing pinned above the bench, a pencil sketch I'd made from a photograph my cousin Wendell sent from across the water. He had stood on a rooftop with a borrowed camera and counted the windows for me, because I had never been further than Margate and was not about to start. 'Get the tower right,' he wrote, 'and the rest forgives you.'

On the Friday I stopped gluing and simply sat with it. I cut a fresh spire from a single length of dowel, sanded it to a taper the width of a fingernail, and stood it upright in a jar of sand while the glue dried. Then I went home for my tea and left the workshop light on, which my landlady complained about for a month.

When the client came in, he picked the model up by its base and turned it slowly, and said nothing for so long I thought he hated it. Then he laughed, a short surprised sound. 'It's standing up straight,' he said. 'Everything else I've seen this year leans.' I didn't tell him the spire was the only piece I'd made without fixing it to anything at all.