Fine line black tattoo of a conical flask, a DNA double helix and an atom with orbiting electrons in a row on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flask, DNA helix and atom on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three small science symbols sit in a horizontal row: a conical flask, a double helix and an atom with three elliptical orbits. The linework is thin, even and solid black with no shading, set against pale skin on a forearm. The composition is centred and evenly spaced, with a blue dental bib visible behind the arm.

Fine line Forearm Orbit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold has been moored below Hythe lock for three weeks, and you have been living aboard it because the rent in Oxford finally beat you. Each morning the fog lifts off the water and you carry the conical flask up from the galley, fill it from the tap and watch the brown river settle into something almost clear. Old Mr Fenwick, who owns the barge and has not come aboard since the flood, left a box of glass tubes and a notebook full of sums under the bench, and you have started copying his figures into your own hand.

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The notebook is about the eels. Fenwick spent forty years counting them through the sluice gates, writing down how many came up each spring, and there is a column at the back where he tried to work out why the numbers were falling. He drew the helix in the margin twice, once with the strands crossed and once straight, as if the answer lay in how the thing was built and not in the water. You do not understand half of it. You understand that the atom on the last page has three rings, and that he has circled one electron in red and written beneath it: still here.

On Thursday the lock keeper walks down the towpath with his clipboard and says the Agency want the sluice closed for the summer, and you tell him you will have the figures by Friday. That night you sit on the roof with the notebook and the lamp, working through the column until the sums come out the same way twice. Fenwick was right about the crossed strands. The eels have been swimming the wrong way round the weir for years, following a scent the new cut took away. In the morning you open the sluice yourself, pour the last of the clear water from the flask into the current, and wait by the gate until a thin dark shape noses up through the spray and does not turn back.