Fine line black outline tattoo of a city skyline on the inner forearm, beside a silver hamsa bracelet with a blue eye charm.

City skyline outline on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of a city skyline with several tall, stepped buildings runs along the inner forearm. The linework is single-weight and unshaded, with no fill, and the ink sits crisply on pale skin. A hand rests beside a cup in a car, with a silver hamsa bracelet set with crystals and red beads on the wrist, and the image is cool-toned with a dark background.

Fine line Forearm City skyline Building Outline Hamsa Bracelet Coffee cup

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had drawn the same skyline for thirty-one years, always from the fourth-floor window above the Pemberton Street drapers, and always in one unbroken line. Her pen was a steel Gillott dipped in Indian ink, and she kept the nibs in a biscuit tin with a dented lid. Shading, she said, was for people who had time to lie about what they had seen. A line either held the roofs or it didn't.

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Her nephew Tomas brought her coffee up the stairs one wet Thursday and asked why she bothered, since the city changed every spring. She said the cranes changed it, not the city. The gasworks chimney went first, then the Lyle clock tower, then the glass spike that had gone up in a season and come down in a week. Each time she drew the gap where it had stood, because the gap was the truest part of any view.

After the funeral he found the sketchbook in the drawer under the tin. Most pages were skylines he knew by heart. The last one was not. It showed a tall, narrow tower with a spire like a sharpened pencil, and at its foot a small arched door no bigger than a thumbnail, and beneath it, in her careful hand, the words next spring. Nothing on the street stood anywhere near it.

Tomas sat at her table with the pen and the ink for a long while. Then, for the first time in the history of that window, he lifted the nib, let the line break, and left a clean white space above the drapers where the sky used to be. He poured the cold coffee into her cup, watched the bare pavement below, and waited for the cranes to come.