Black line drawing of four triangle symbols in a row, each with a handwritten label, showing an upward triangle, a downward triangle, an upward triangle with one bar and a downward triangle with two

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four element triangles with handwritten labels

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

Four simple black outline symbols sit side by side on a white background, each with a handwritten word beneath it. The first is an upward triangle, the second a downward triangle, the third an upward triangle crossed by one horizontal bar, and the fourth a downward triangle crossed by two horizontal bars. The labels read water, air and earth, with the first label written in the same cursive hand, and the linework is even and uniform throughout.

Geometric Fine line Triangle Water Earth Handwriting Line drawing

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The overman at Scarrow Drift kept four signs chalked above the lamp-room door, and nobody was allowed to rub them out. Fire pointed up, the way a flame does. Water pointed down, the way it runs. Air was an upward triangle with one bar across its middle, because air would not be held, and earth was a downward triangle with two bars, because earth was heavy and the bars were what kept it from sliding off the world.

Keep reading

The winter the east level flooded, the company men said the signs were nonsense and sent a clerk down to scrub them off. He used carbolic and a wire brush. That night the water came through the old wall at the bottom of the shaft, and the men working by the lamp-room door felt the ground go soft under their boots. Ada Tully, twelve years old and too small for the coal, had carried the chalk every morning since her father died, and she had redrawn the marks whenever the rain took them.

She stood in the lamp room with a stub of chalk while the clerk's wet rag dripped in the bucket. Her uncle Tom said the pit would take them all if she wasted time on pictures. She drew the earth sign again, two bars across it, pressing so hard the chalk squeaked. Then she drew water, then air, then fire, and the men went past her into the drift one by one, touching the lintel as they went.

The east level held. Nobody could say why the wall stood where it should have fallen, but the bars were still there in the morning, white and even. Ada kept the chalk in her apron pocket after that, and every spring she drew the four again, fire at the top and earth at the bottom, and nobody asked her to stop.