Close-up of a small geometric tattoo of four solid black vertical bars of varying heights on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four black bars on the upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of four solid black rectangles of differing heights arranged side by side, resembling a simple bar chart. The bars have crisp, straight edges and solid black fill, with no shading or fine detail. The ink sits on hairy skin against a plain, softly lit background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger said Greyhaven and the chalk said something else, and by the third week out of Tyne Dock Halvard had stopped trusting either. I was the second mate's clerk, which meant I counted what came up the gangway: sacks of salt cod, crates of Dutch tile, one upright piano in a cradle that nobody would name an owner for. Every count went onto the slate by the galley door as a bar, one stroke per hold, height for the number of crates. The cook called it the weather board. The men called it the bars.

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On the night the swell came up off Rattray Head, a sea came over the rail and wiped the slate clean. When I went to chalk it again I found the cook had already redrawn it from memory, and he had got the heights wrong in a way that made the strokes lean toward each other like men leaning into wind. Halvard looked at it a long time. He said the sea had done the counting for us and the sum came out the same either way, which was the only kind of comfort a mate ever offered.

We made Rotterdam with the cargo two crates short and the piano still lashed in its cradle. Before I left the ship I took the chalk from the galley and drew one more bar beside the four, taller than all of them, and left it bare. Nobody had asked me to. The cook said it was the only honest line on the board, because it was the only one that had not yet been counted.

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