Woman in a grey crop top and black cap holding up a phone, with a small black fine line tattoo of vertical marks on her upper arm.

Fine line marks on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A mirror selfie of a woman in a grey crop top, black cap and black leggings, with her face hidden behind a raised phone. A small black tattoo of thin vertical marks runs down the outer upper arm, with fine, delicate linework. The plain white wall behind her keeps the focus on the arm and the outfit.

Fine line Upper arm Script Character

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

The water-woman at Halfway Well could not read, but she could count, so she kept the record by cutting marks into the post beside the trough. One notch for each traveller who drank and paid, and one long cut for each one who did not come back up the road. The post was grey with cuts by the time the carter Tomas Vell came in from the west, his mules thin and his jaw set against the dust.

Keep reading

He asked her what the long cuts meant. She told him they were the people the desert had kept. He laughed and said the desert kept nothing, it only lost things and forgot them. She poured him water and said nothing more, because he was young and the wind was loud.

Three days later he came back on foot with no mules and asked her for a knife. He did not touch the post. He took the measuring stick she used for the water, and along its side he cut a row of thin upright marks, one for each night he had lain under the stars, and then one long line for the animals he had lost. "So the road will know I was counted," he said.

She gave him the stick to keep. Years afterwards, carters who passed Halfway Well said the old post had a wall of notches, and that the younger drivers carried sticks marked like the young man's. Nobody could say which language the marks belonged to, only that every one of them stood up straight and none of them lay down.