Black dotwork tattoo of a symmetrical ornament on the forearm, joined by a fine dotted line to a matching motif on the palm.

Dotwork ornament on forearm and palm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large symmetrical ornament, built from stippled dots and fine lines, sits on the upper forearm just below the elbow. A thin dotted line runs down the forearm to the wrist, with a small diamond shape along it, and a smaller ornament matching the forearm design is tattooed on the palm. The work is entirely in black ink and grey shading against a dark background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Hand Ornament Mandala Diamond Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ottoline Vane found the chart still open on the breakfast table, weighted at its corners with the marmalade pot, the salt cellar and two of her late husband's brass sounding weights. Mr Crane had gone in the night without settling the back bedroom, but he had left the sea behind him in fine black pricks, a line of them running from the cliff stair across the harbour to a small diamond at the old lifeboat slip.

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She knew that diamond. Her husband Walter had sounded that water every spring for thirty years, and he never once told her what he found there, only that a man who spoke of depths in company was asking to be drowned. Mr Crane had pricked the line so finely it looked like breath on glass. In the margin he had drawn a quatrefoil, small enough to cover with a thumb, and beneath it he had written a single word she could not make out in the lamplight.

At low water she went down the cliff stair with the chart folded inside her coat and the brass weights knocking together in her pocket. The slip was green with weed and smelled of old rope. She counted the pricks under her breath, as Walter had taught her, and when she reached the diamond the sea was already sliding back over the stone, cold as a shilling.

She knelt and pressed one weight flat against the slipway. Beneath the grey water the dotted line seemed to run on past the harbour wall and out towards the horizon, and she thought of the little quatrefoil and what a man might carry across the water in his keeping. The tide came in over her knees and she let it.