Curly braces on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a small tattoo on the inner wrist, with the palm turned upwards and the hand resting on a bed. The tattoo is a pair of curly braces, one opening and one closing, drawn in thin black linework with no shading. The ink is black only, and the tattoo sits alone against the plain skin with the bedding and a white cable blurred in the background.

Fine line Forearm Symbol

Find an artist for this

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

The wardens at Ffald Colliery said the shaft would hold so long as the two iron curves stood either side of the gap, and nobody was to fit a third. Old Gwen Mostyn kept the lamp house key and told the new boys this every morning while she handed out the brass tallies, and most of them nodded and forgot it by dinner.

Keep reading

Tom Edrich came up from the farms in the spring of that year, all elbows and questions. On his second day he asked her what was inside the curves. "Nothing," Gwen said, not looking up from the ledger. "That's what they're for. They hold the space open so a cage can pass through it and a man can come back up."

In the dry August the roof gave at the four-hundred level, and nine men were cut off behind a wall of stone and slurry. The overmen wanted to wait for the pumps. Tom, who had spent the summer carrying timber for the brace-setters, took a lamp and a coil of rope and went down with Gwen's brother, who had sworn he would never go below again. They found the fall had pinched the roadway into a gap no wider than a coffin lid, and the timbers either side of it were bowing inward. Tom knelt in the wet and measured with his hands, then began driving wedges into the curved props, one after another, until the gap held. The men crawled out through it one by one, black to the eyes, and nobody was crushed.

Years later Tom was the one standing at the shaft head with a new pair of curves on the bench in front of him, pale and unpainted. A young lad asked whether he could fill the space between them with a plate or a sign. Tom laughed and told him what Gwen had told him, that nothing inside was the whole purpose of the thing.