Black and grey geometric block lettering tattooed vertically along the inner forearm of a person holding an open hand out over a wooden floor.

Geometric block lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a vertical row of angular, blocky letterforms tattooed along the inner forearm. The bold solid black linework has sharp triangular and diamond-shaped strokes, with no visible shading. The forearm and open hand fill the frame against a wooden plank floor, with a white top and dark trousers at the edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letters on the signal mast at Scarrow Holm are the first thing the relief keeper has to learn, because the mainland boats will not wait for anyone to explain them. You climb the iron ladder with Halloran's chalk slate under your arm while he is already halfway down, shouting the sounds over his shoulder. The wedge is a sea rising, the bar is flat calm, and the diamond at the foot means the tide has closed the causeway.

Keep reading

The shapes are painted in black on white boards, blunt and angled, with nothing rounded anywhere. Halloran's grandmother used to say a storm could not argue with a corner. You copy them into the logbook every morning until your hand stops shaking on the diagonals. The sequence changes with the weather, but the mast itself never does, and after a while you think of it as a sentence the island keeps saying to itself.

In March the glass drops for three days and you work the mast by lamp at dusk, spelling out the warning for the Lerwick packet. Halloran is ashore with his chest. When the boat rounds the point with its lights steady, the captain's reply comes back in the same hard angles, and you understand that he has been reading your signals as carefully as Halloran's, and that he has never once needed the slate.

On the last morning of the month you take down the boards to scrub them. On the back of the oldest one there is a single diamond, painted over so many times it has gone thick and white, and beneath it a small drawing of a door standing open onto grey water.

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