Black fine-line tattoo of a map-like network of crossing lines and hatched areas across a hand and forearm.

Fine black linework map across a hand and forearm

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand and forearm are raised toward the left against a pale tiled wall. Thin black lines form a tangled network resembling a map or route plan, with hatched patches on the back of the hand, the wrist and the forearm, and lines continuing onto the fingers and palm. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the lines are fine and uneven, with the densest hatching concentrated across the back of the hand and forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor came up the valley road in March with a leather case and a theodolite on a mule, and by the first thaw he had walked every seam under Carrick Fell and drawn them out on paper. Ada Penrose watched him from the wash-house door. She was the only one in Hollin Row who could read a plan, because her father had taught her before the pit took him, and she thought the surveyor's lines looked like a spider had walked through wet ink.

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He went down the shafts for a fortnight. When he came up he sat in the Crown with his sleeves rolled and the drawing spread across the table, and the men crowded round to see where the coal lay and where the water was. He tapped the paper with one finger. Here, he said, and here, and here. The passages ran under the chapel and under the Cragg farm and out beneath the reservoir that was supposed to be sound. Nobody spoke. Then Old Tom Hesketh laughed and said the squire would have to buy the chapel back.

Ada took the drawing home that night and held it against the lamp. The lines were not a route to the coal at all. They were the way the water came in, a thread at a time, the way it had always come in, and the men had been digging against it without knowing where it ran. She copied the whole tangle onto the back of her own hand with a pen from the chapel box, slowly, the way her father had taught her to copy a plan, until the wrist and the forearm were dark with it.

In the morning she walked the men to the reservoir wall and laid her hand flat against the stone. Nobody argued. They dug where her hand told them, and the water stayed where it was.

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