Forearm with a full cross-stitch style geometric tattoo in grey, red, pink and yellow diamonds and crosses, against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross-stitch style geometric sleeve on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm and hand, held in a relaxed, slightly curled position, are shown against a plain black background. The forearm is covered in a dense pattern of square pixel-like blocks that imitate cross-stitch embroidery, forming diamonds, crosses and stepped motifs. The palette is mainly muted red, pink, yellow and dark grey on the skin, with clean, even lighting that makes the grid of blocks easy to see.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Hand Geometric pattern Diamond Crosses Sleeve

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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

Your grandmother counts with her lips moving, never her eyes, and by the third week you have stopped asking her to slow down. The linen is pinned to the kitchen table on Skerrow, the window salt-blind, the kettle ticking as it cools. She taps the chart with a bitten fingernail. Every square is a stitch, and every stitch is a choice someone made a hundred years ago, when the island women had nothing but thread and the long dark of February.

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You learn the diamonds first, four quarters meeting at a point, then the little crosses that sit inside them like seeds in a split pod. Red for the ones who married off the island, dark grey for the ones who stayed, yellow for anything the ferry brought over. She says it as a joke and then doesn't laugh. When you reach the centre of the third repeat you miscount by one, and the whole stepped border drifts a square to the left, like a row of fence posts walking off in a gale.

You expect her to unpick it. Instead she holds the cloth to the window, squints at the drift, and hands the needle back. "Leave it," she says. "Somebody has to be able to find where we went wrong."

That night you walk down to the shore with the sampler folded under your arm. The tide is out far enough to show the old causeway, a line of wet stones laid in exact squares. You count them with your bare feet, one, two, three, and at the fourth you stop, step sideways, and keep going.