Black geometric blackwork tattoo of nested diamonds, crosses and dashed lines running down an upper arm.

Geometric diamond blackwork on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large central diamond built from concentric angled lines, with a smaller diamond chain and rows of cross and dash marks running up and down the arm. The linework is solid black with even, controlled strokes and some areas of fine hatching along the diamond edges. The design is shown in colour-free black ink against plain skin, with a dark sleeve at the top of the frame and a pale background.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Diamond Cross Geometric pattern Dashes Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hanging had been folded in a sealed chest for so long that the wool had taken the shape of its own creases, and Marta could not lift it without it splitting along the old folds. She laid it flat on a trestle in the gatehouse, where the roof had gone in the winter of the great storm and grey light came down through the rafters in long bars. Someone had worked a large diamond into the cloth, built of lines that narrowed toward a small cross at its heart, and around it ran rows of tiny stitches and short dashes, like the marks a mason makes when he counts.

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The steward's ledger said the women of the household had made it during the siege, and that it was to be hung in the solar when the garrison came home. It never was. Marta found the reason in the margins, where a clerk had written forty-one names beside a column of crosses, one cross for each man. She counted the crosses on the border twice. They matched, all but two, and those two had been left as bare thread.

She sat with that for a long while as the light moved across the flagstones. Then she threaded her needle with the blue silk she had brought up from Hereford and, along the bottom edge where the frayed wool ran out, she began two small crosses of her own, one for the clerk who had kept the count and one for the storm that had taken the roof. Her stitches were not as even as the old ones. She let them stand.