Black and white photo of a forearm with five thin black horizontal lines tattooed in parallel bands around it, in a fine line style on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five parallel lines around a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pale forearm and hanging hand are photographed against a dark background, with five evenly spaced thin black lines wrapping horizontally around the forearm near the wrist. The linework is crisp and uniform, with no shading, and the lines follow the curve of the arm. The image is black and white, with a dark diagonal shape and a small silver ring on one finger.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the crisp packet, because I'll not tell it twice and the lift is out again so nobody's going anywhere. You want the old Thornbury Tower story? Right. It starts with Mr Okafor's stripes, though he never called them that. He called them the bands, five of them, painted round the stairwell wall on every landing of Block C in 1971, a finger's width apart, so a child coming home in the dark could count them with a hand on the cold paint and know which floor was hers.

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Nobody thought much of it until the winter the power went off for nine days and the whole block went black as a coal sack. Ruth Pemberton on the eleventh had a boy who wouldn't come in from the balcony, and she came down eleven flights with a torch that gave out on the fourth. She didn't need it. She counted the bands with her palm, down and down, five lines on every turn, and she got to the bottom with her boy's name still in her mouth.

Here's the bit I like. When they knocked the block down in 2004 the men with the machines did it floor by floor, and the last thing standing was the stairwell, all grey and skeleton. On the very last wall, under a fresh coat of council cream, you could still see the ghost of those five lines where the paint had soaked in deeper. Nobody painted them back. Nobody needed to. Some things get counted into a body and stay there.

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