Fine line tattoos of script, arrow lines and a small ship on a woman's forearm, upper arm and thigh, as she holds dried grass on a concrete floor.

Fine line script and ship tattoos on arm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on a concrete floor, reaching forward with one hand holding a dry grass stem, and her face is out of frame. Thin black and grey linework forms handwritten script and an arrow-like line on the forearm, a dark band on the upper arm, and a small ship drawing on the thigh. The soft, grainy film photograph uses a muted palette of grey, pale skin and blush pink, with the tattoos as the main points of detail.

Fine line Forearm Upper arm Thigh Script Arrow Ship Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter from Valparaíso had come in a bread bag, folded so many times the ink had cracked along the creases. Maud read it standing in the yard behind the chandlery while the tide slapped under the jetty. Tom wrote the way he talked, sideways and sure of himself: the barque was sound, the cook had stolen the rum again, and he had found a bird that could say his name.

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She did not write back that night. Instead she walked out past the sheds to the saltings at the end of the Hoo road, where the marsh grass had gone to seed and rattled like paper in the wind. Her father used to say you could steer by the grass if you knew how to read it, the stems all leaning one way for the prevailing wind. She pulled a dry stalk and held it against the sky, trying to find the arrow of it, the direction the dead thing pointed.

Tom had drawn a ship on the back of the envelope, a little three-master with its sails filled out, and beneath it a line that ran off the edge of the paper towards nothing. She had laughed at that when she first saw it. Now she turned the envelope over in her fingers and understood he had been trying to tell her where he meant to come home from, and that the line was not yet finished.

She sent her reply on the Thursday boat, folded small, with one stalk of the marsh grass pressed flat inside. Write me the rest of the line, she wrote, and tell me which way the wind is blowing where you are.