Fine line tattoo of thin vertical marks on the upper arm of a woman wearing a purple jumpsuit and statement necklace.

Fine line marks on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a long purple jumpsuit stands against a white garage door, cropped below the chin so no face is shown. A small tattoo of thin, vertical black marks runs down her upper arm, and the lines are too small to read with confidence. The image is mostly fashion-focused, with the purple fabric, a silver statement necklace, a grey clutch and a black bracelet filling most of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Script Line Necklace

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

You learn the trade of copying from Mr Hollis, who keeps the customs ledger in the upstairs room of the Salt House, where the window looks straight down on the quay. Every morning he hands you a pen and a stack of bills of lading, and every morning you write the same thing in a hand that slants the wrong way, top to bottom, the way the old merchants insisted. By March your wrist aches and your letters have stopped looking like words. They look like rigging, thin black lines falling down the page in a row.

Keep reading

The consignment that comes in on the Thursday tide is cloth: forty bolts of violet silk, shipped from a dye works up the coast and consigned to a woman whose name you have never heard. The lines on her manifest are written in the same vertical hand as yours. Someone in some other office has been copying the same way, and you trace one of their strokes with a fingertip and find the ink still tacky.

You are sent down to the quay to check the bales against the list. The wind off the water snatches at the paper. A crate has split and a length of purple slides across the cobbles, and you kneel and gather it up, heavy and cool, counting the stitches along its edge against the figures. It all tallies. When you stand, a woman is waiting by the bollard with a grey clutch under one arm. She takes the list from your hand, reads the vertical lines without hesitation, and says you have spelled her name correctly.

You have not spelled it at all. You tell her so, and she folds the paper into her bag and says that is precisely why she came down to the quay herself.