Small black fine line tattoo on a forearm showing a wave, a pine tree and a mountain above an arrow marked 49 degrees and an anchor.

Fine line wave, tree, mountain and anchor on arm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a wave, a pine tree and a mountain in a row above a horizontal arrow with the number 49 and a degree symbol, with a small anchor below. The linework is fine and mostly even, with light shading in the tree and arrow fletching. The tattoo is in black ink only, centred on a pale skin surface against a dark background.

Fine line Forearm Wave Pine tree Mountain Arrow Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put that knife down, Tam, and mind the potatoes, because I'll not tell this twice with the stove spitting like that. You want to know why there's a line in Mr Fenwick's pencil running clean across the chart like a length of string? That's forty-nine north. He drew it the week we left Esquimalt, and he tapped it with his finger the way a man taps a coin he doesn't trust.

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Fenwick used to sit on the locker by the bread bin and tell the watch what lay along that line. A wave that comes in out of nowhere, he said, and a pine so dark it looks like the night has grown roots. Mountains with snow on their shoulders in July. And at the far end, an anchorage where the water stops moving and a ship can finally drop her iron and sleep. The men laughed at him, mostly, because nobody on that ship had ever seen a place they'd want to stop at.

Then the fog came down three days out and the compass started swinging like a drunk at a wedding. The captain wanted to heave to and wait for clear sky. Tam, you took that chart off the table and put your finger on the pencil line and said we keep the bow on it. So we did. We read the noon shadow, we counted the hours, and we held forty-nine like a rope in the dark, until the fog tore open on a black fringe of pines and the water went flat as a plate.

Mr Fenwick's been in the ground twenty years now, and the pencil's gone soft as bread. But when I shut my eyes I still see that line. Now pass me the salt, and mind you don't drop the anchor on your own foot.