Small black doodle-style tattoos of symbols and objects cover both forearms and the back of the hands, which have dark nail polish.

Doodle-style symbol tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms and hands are shown with many small black line drawings of symbols and objects, including dice, an eye, a lightning bolt, a crescent moon, a dagger, a skull and a fish skeleton. The linework is thin and uniform with no shading, and the ink is entirely black on pale skin. The hands are placed together in the centre of the frame, with light-coloured trousers visible behind them.

Forearm Hand Dice Eye Lightning bolt Crescent moon Dagger Skull Pentagram Ankh Arrow Axe Pizza slice Crystal Pipe

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 big top at Harrowgate Fields has been folded since March, and the ledger falls to you because nobody else will sit in the caravan while the damp climbs the walls. Inside the lid of the tin trunk you find the real accounts. They are not in the neat columns the owner kept. They are in the margins, biro scratched into the gaps between bookings: a crescent moon, a dagger, a fish skeleton, a pipe, a skull with its jaw hung open. Someone counted thirteen beside a scribbled ghoul.

Keep reading

Each drawing is a night that paid. The pizza slice is the Tuesday in Margate when the generator died and the crew ate from a delivery van at midnight, the whole show laughing in the rain. The axe belongs to the summer the knife-thrower's assistant walked out at Skegness, and the lightning bolt to the storm that tore the canvas in two. The crystal and the eye are fortunes told to people who came for a laugh and stayed for the answer. You read them slowly, the way you would read someone else's letters, and you begin to feel the trunk is heavier than the tent ever was.

The last page has no column at all. There is a row of six dice, five showing their pips and the sixth left empty, and beneath them a single arrow pointing at the bottom margin. You turn the page over and the bottom margin is blank, so you take the biro from the drawer and draw the thing you have been avoiding: a small open door, and a stick figure with one hand raised. The buyer arrives on Thursday. He weighs the trunk on a grocer's scale and says it is worth more for the tin than for the tale.