A woman with her face hidden by her hands shows a dark tattoo on her upper arm near the shoulder, in a blue tank top and denim cut-offs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with a blonde bob holds both hands over her face in front of a weathered wooden fence. She wears a blue vest top, a plaid shirt tied at the waist, denim cut-offs and a belt, with stacked studded and cuff bracelets and a gold watch on her wrist. A dark tattoo is visible on her upper arm near the shoulder, though its design is too partly hidden by the top to make out clearly.

Upper arm Woman Tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fence was my grandfather's argument with the weather. Every June he went down the garden with a tin of blue-grey wash and a brush worn to a stub, painting over the boards the rain had lifted, and every October the winter stripped the paint back to bare grain. He said the colour was the sea at Whitstable on a day it couldn't make up its mind. I thought it looked like the inside of a mussel shell, and told him so, and he laughed until he had to sit down on the upturned bucket.

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The gate hung from a hinge the colour of pond water. It squealed, which was the point. Grandad said a gate that didn't announce itself was a gate with secrets, and he had no time for secrets in a garden. So every evening I was sent to shut it, and every evening I stopped to pick the rust off the strap with my thumbnail, because it came away in curls like pencil shavings.

The summer I was eleven, the wash ran out a week early. He sent me to the shed for another tin and I came back empty handed, having spent twenty minutes on the step with the cat. He was standing by the fence with one palm flat against a board, as though feeling for a pulse. "It's all right," he said. "Leave it a bit rough. Rough holds the weather better than paint does."

We never finished the fence. The hinge outlasted him, and so did the squeal. When I open that gate now I stand a moment before it moves, listening for the sound that tells me someone is coming through, and I have never once painted over the bare patch beside the latch.