Back view of a man in a red plaid shirt and leather suspenders, with partly visible black and grey tattoos on both forearms.

Forearm tattoos on a man in a plaid shirt

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind, turned away from the camera, wearing a red tartan check shirt with rolled sleeves and brown leather suspenders. Dark tattoos are partly visible on both forearms, with shading and linework visible on the right arm but too little of the design shown to identify a style. The background is softly blurred foliage and a pale wall, with warm natural light.

Forearm Tattoo Man

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock at Hobbs Weir had been stuck since March, so we tied up below it and waited for Dessie to come down the towpath with the key and his opinions about the council. Nobody had told the Mary Ellen she was in no hurry. She sat low and patient on the brown water while the light went orange behind the poplars.

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My cousin Cal leaned on the tiller with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, the way he always did when he wanted the bank to see the knot he'd had inked in Leeds the winter before. It ran down his forearm in dark, shaded coils, thick as coal smoke, and every lock-keeper from Shardlow to Sawley had asked him about it. He told them it was a bowline. It was not a bowline. He had drawn it himself on the back of a chandlery receipt, and the man in Leeds had only made it permanent.

Dessie arrived at last with a torch and a bag of chips, and the gates groaned open. We went through in the dark, Cal walking the beam with a rope in his fist while the water sucked and fell around us like breath. When the top gates shut behind us and the lamp on the cut came up gold, he laughed and said the knot had held, which was what he always said after anything went right. I didn't argue. Upstream the weir roared.

Later, with the barge moored under the willows, Cal sat on the cabin step and picked at the rope until the knot came loose in his hands. He looked at his forearm for a long moment, then at the slack line lying across his knees, and let the whole coil slide into the black water without a sound.