Two black and grey photographs of a forearm with a fine line tattoo of four parallel bands around the wrist, and on the left a triangle with a horizontal bar and small marks below it.

Four-line band and triangle on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The left photograph shows a forearm with four thin parallel bands encircling the wrist area, and a single-line triangle with a horizontal bar below the bands, with small stylised marks beneath it. The right photograph is a black and white close view of four fine parallel lines wrapping around the forearm, with smooth, even linework and soft natural skin shading. Both images are in black ink only, with the tattoos set against plain backgrounds.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Line Band Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hannah Dunning kept the bell at Corrie Skerry, and every winter the boats that went out past the bar came home by its ringing. The islanders said the four rings of ink on her wrist were for her four sons, all lost to the same grey water, and the children were told this until they were old enough to count the rings and see that one of them was thinner than the others.

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The triangle was a different matter. She had pricked it in the winter the lamp failed, using a sail needle and soot from the kettle, and beneath it she made small dashes for every tide she had rung through. Nobody on the island could read the dashes but Hannah, and when Agnes Tulloch asked what the bar under the triangle meant, Hannah only said it was where a boat rested when the sea wanted it to.

One November a young man called Tobias Reed rowed out in a squall that had no business being there. Hannah rang the bell until her arm gave out, then rang it with the other. He came in at first light, soaked and gasping, and asked her what the triangle was for. She told him it was the shape a boat made when two oars pulled and one held the tiller true. He laughed, then saw she was not joking.

She pulled her sleeve down over the rings and went back to the bell. When they laid her out in spring, they found the thin ring had been drawn over twice, once for each of the two boys who had come home to her, and the dashes beneath the triangle ran on to a number nobody had thought to count.