Outline of a triangle on the inner forearm, filled with purple, blue and pink galaxy-style shading, with a white sleeve pushed up above it.

Galaxy-filled triangle on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single triangle outline sits on the inner forearm of a person wearing a white long-sleeved top. The thin black-free outline is filled with soft purple, blue and pink shading that suggests a starry, galaxy-like texture. The plain white background keeps the focus on the arm and the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the ledger in the potting shed, wedged behind a tin of sulphur and a box of dead bulbs, and it is your uncle's handwriting that stops you: small capitals, every page dated, the same three words underlined on the first sheet. Three corners. The garden at Hollin Lodge has always been a square of brick, but the pond he dug in the far corner was never square at all. It is a triangle with its points cut sharp, and the water inside it is so black at night that the sky seems to sit down in it.

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You walk down with a torch, though you do not switch it on. The frogs have stopped. Beside the pond stands a lead sundial whose shadow no longer falls where the numerals say it should, and you kneel on the wet flags to read the ledger by starlight. He had sketched the sky every clear night for forty years, joining dots with a steel ruler. Three stars, bright and close together, formed the points. Beneath them, in pencil, he had written: "Keep the water level. Don't let them drift apart."

Last spring a heron tore the liner on one side, and the water sagged into a lopsided shape that made your uncle's drawings wrong. You patched it with rubber and grey tape and told yourself nobody would notice. Now you lean over the surface and the reflected stars wobble, the blue and violet and faint pink of the Milky Way bleeding into each other like watercolour left in the rain.

You fetch the watering can and fill it at the tap, carrying it down in short careful trips until the water stands level with the stone lip on all three sides. When the ripples finally settle, the three bright stars sit exactly in the corners, and you stay there until the cold comes up through the flags, counting them the way he taught you, once for each side.

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