Fine line black tattoo of two crossed lines with the letters H, A, S and D placed around the centre, on the inner upper arm.

Crossed lines with letters on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of two straight lines crossing at the centre, with a single capital letter at the end of each arm: H at the top, A on the right, S at the bottom and D on the left. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black against pale skin. The tattoo sits on the inner upper arm, shown in close crop with a grey sleeve on the left edge and a plain light background.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Letter Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the chain links again, so the brass pins rang like teeth when I hauled it out of the barn. Dad always said you could not survey a field in January, that the ground lied to you when it was hard, but the solicitors wanted the boundary settled by Friday and Uncle Ted had already moved the hedge twice in his head.

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Dad had marked the corners years before, painting a letter on each oak post: H for Hollin Gate, A for the ash by the ditch, S for the sallow at the bottom of the lane, D for the Dunmere wall. He had joined them with two lines of tarred string that crossed at the old well, and he used to say that was the only honest way to find the middle of anything. I walked the bearings with the theodolite, my breath hanging in front of me, and the numbers came out where they always had.

The S post was wrong. It had been pulled and set again a stride nearer the house, the new wood still pale, the letter fresh and neat in red paint that Ted kept for gates. I stood at the crossing and sighted along the string to the A, and the line missed the D by the width of a finger, which was exactly the width Ted would argue over in court.

I pushed a new stake into the frozen ground where the strings had crossed for forty years and left it bare, no letter on it at all. Then I walked home with the chain singing on my shoulder, and I did not look back to see whether the lights were on in the farmhouse.