Black ink filigree scroll design on the inner forearm, shown in a black and white photo with a hand holding a pearl-studded ring.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Filigree scroll design on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dark, ornate design of interlocking swirls, loops and dots runs along the inner forearm, with a small diamond-shaped motif at the lower end. The lines are fine and even, and the design is solid black with no shading. The photograph is black and white, with the forearm across the frame and a hand at the top right holding a pearl-studded ring against a textured grey background.

Forearm Swirl Scroll Filigree Dot Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, it's the last of the oil, and I'll not waste it on the dark. Sit there, by the stove. Now, you want to know why old Marit Vosse never sold the Patience though the canal company offered her three hundred pounds for her and the dog? I'll tell you, but you'll not interrupt me with your phone.

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Her father ran the barge before her, and his father before him, and every spring they went up the Great Ouse to the locks at Bedford with their coal and came back with bolts of cloth. On one run he took on a lacquer-box from a boatman who had lost his nerve, and inside the box was a coil of silver wire no thicker than a hair, wound so tight it looked like frost. The boatman said it had been drawn by a woman in Lisbon who could not afford to be paid, and that whoever wore it would never be lost on water. He wanted nothing for it but to be rid of it.

Marit's father never wore it. He kept it under the stove for thirty years, and when the stove cracked he gave the wire to Marit and said, make it into something that stays on the body, because a thing on paper washes out in the rain. So she sat up every night of one winter with a fine pen and her mother's ink, copying those wire loops onto her own forearm, swirl after swirl, dot after dot, a little diamond at the wrist to show where the current turns. It took her until the ice came off the river.

And when the spring floods came, and the Patience broke loose in the reeds at the Hemingford bend, Marit held her arm out over the gunwale, and the swirls on her skin ran the same way as the eddies in the water. The boat turned. It slid back into the channel as neat as a stitch. Now go on, ask me again about the three hundred pounds.