Black fine line tattoo of a guitar built from overlapping circles and construction lines, on the inner forearm.

Fine line guitar outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black linework tattoo shows a guitar-like form made from overlapping circles, a straight neck, tuning pegs and fine construction lines with small dots and arrows. The body sits on the inner forearm against a dark, softly blurred background. The composition is vertical and centred, and the design is entirely black ink with no shading or colour.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Guitar Circle Dot Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boy was sent to the instrument maker at the edge of the salt marsh because his mother had heard the old man would take anyone who could hold a cord straight. He arrived with a sack of gut and no money. The maker did not look up from his bench. He pointed at a length of ash, a pot of pitch, and a coil of linen cord, then went back to scraping a bone.

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For a month the boy did nothing but draw. The maker showed him how to peg one cord to the floor, swing a second around it, and scratch a circle. Then the boy had to strike another circle from a point on the first one's edge, and another after that, each sitting a little lower than the last. Where the pegs had stood he left small dots, and beside the curves he drew arrows to show which way the grain must run. The maker kicked the drawings into the rushes each morning. "A sound is only as true as the lines that made it," he said, and nothing more.

On the thirty-first night the boy stayed up with the lamp and the cord and laid out the whole thing on the floor again, from the top peg to the bottom one. When he finally stretched the first gut string across the finished board and plucked it, the note went out over the marsh like rain starting on a roof. The maker came in from the dark, wiped his hands, and listened to the note die away.

He said nothing about the sound. He only took a rag, rubbed out the one line the boy had drawn crooked, and left the dots where they stood. Years later the boy built his own instruments, and every one carried those dots somewhere inside it, marking where the pegs had been.