Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a bold curved line with trailing ink dots and a splatter on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curved line and ink dots on an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink curved line sweeps across the arm, with its heavier, tapering stroke at the top and fading softly toward the bottom. A horizontal trail of small dots and a larger splatter runs from beneath the curve towards the right edge of the frame. The image is greyscale, with the skin tones reduced to soft greys against a plain light background.

Blackwork Upper arm Curved line Dot Splatter Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the 7.42 has gone without me, which is my own fault for stopping at the buffet to refill the nib. The platform here bends like a wire someone left out in the rain, so from this bench I can see the rails curving away towards Carlisle until they vanish. Mr Hale at the ticket window says the signal fault will be mended by noon, though he said the same thing yesterday with the same tired face.

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I was halfway through the second side when the pen shook. A bead of ink ran off the nib and landed on the page like a full stop that had decided to become a sentence. Then another, then three more, trailing across the paper in a line exactly like the cinders the old engines used to throw onto the cuttings behind Mother's house. I did not blot it. It seemed a better letter than the one I was writing.

A porter who has worked this station for forty years stood by my bench with his hands in his coat pockets and told me the platform was bent so the driver could see the last carriage from his cab. It seemed a lot of trouble to take over a curve. I said that we in our family had never once been able to see the last carriage of anything, and he laughed as if I had made a joke, which I had not meant to do.

The 9.10 is on the board now. I am going to catch it, and I am folding this page into the envelope with the blot still wet on it, so you can see exactly where the ink gave out before I did.