Black ink blackwork tattoo of five stacked circular motifs on the inner forearm, showing a flame, a hand, a tree, scales and an eye.

Five circular black ink symbols down a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Five solid black circular motifs run in a vertical column down the forearm: a flame, a hand holding a small piece of script, a tree with roots, a set of scales beside a bar, and an eye within an open circle. The designs use bold filled shapes and negative space with no shading, and the ink is entirely black against pale skin. The photo is taken straight on with the arm angled across the frame and a soft shadow falling at the left edge.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Flame Hand Script Tree Scale Eye Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time we raised the Azores, the tin had lost its flame. Old Mags Penrose had traded it to a stoker for a bottle of gin and a promise she never meant to keep, and the rest of us spent the first dog watch arguing over whether fire was worth more than a shovel of coal.

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The tokens were the purser's notion, a way of keeping a hungry crew honest on a long crossing. Each one was cut from the lid of a biscuit tin and stamped with a sign: a flame for the galley, a hand holding a folded letter for whoever wrote home, a tree for the man who had carried seeds in his sea chest, scales for the cook who weighed every ration twice, and an eye for the lookout. Nobody asked which one I wanted. I took the eye, because it was the only one that watched the horizon for me.

Off the Grand Banks the fog came down thick as wet wool and I could not see my own bow. I stood the watch with the tin in my pocket, feeling the edges of the others through the cloth, and tallied what I owed the men against what I had taken from their shares. When the murk thinned there was a lantern off the port side, low and yellow, and a voice calling the name of the ship we had been told was lost.

Mags came up at dawn with the flame token in her fist, sheepish, and pressed it back into my palm. We sailed into harbour with four tokens and one honest debt, which seemed a fair cargo for a lookout who had finally looked.