Close view of a person lying in white bedding, showing three small fine line tick marks on the inner forearm and a small letter and short script on the ribs, in black ink.

Fine line marks on forearm and ribs

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on white bedding, with an arm across the body. Three short vertical fine line strokes sit on the inner forearm, and a small single letter with a tail is placed on the side of the ribs, near a line of small script further right. The ink is black on skin with a soft, even tone, and the crisp white fabric makes the thin linework stand out.

Fine line Forearm Ribs Tally marks Letter Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had stopped for the interval when Mrs Pell caught me at the cloakroom hatch and told me to stop mooning over the trumpet player. Three dances, she said, and then I could look at him as much as I liked. I had a carpenter's pencil behind my ear because the ink pen had dried out the week before, so I made my tallies the old way, short upright strokes along the edge of the ticket tray, the way my father counted sheep through the gate at Hollins Farm.

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Three was the rule at the Palais. Three dances with the same partner and the whole hall knew you were walking out. Tommy Greave asked me on the fourth Saturday of October and I said yes before he had finished the sentence, which Mrs Pell said was the sort of mistake a girl makes once. I wrote the strokes again the next week, and the week after, until the tray was ruled off in threes like a gate of fence rails.

In December a letter came from Ruston in Tommy's square hand. It said only that he had taken a job on the railway and would not be dancing again. I read it at the hatch with the music thudding through the floorboards. Under his name he had drawn a small p with a long tail, the way his mother used to sign the cake sale notices, and I understood it was his initial, or the start of something he had not got round to finishing.

I did not go to the station. I kept coming on Saturday nights and kept the tally going, one stroke for every dance I danced with nobody at all. By spring there were more lines than I could bear to count, so I stopped counting and let them stand, three to a group, straight as the posts on Father's land.