A woman holds her hands over her face, showing dark geometric ornamental tattoos on the back of one hand, the wrist and a finger.

Geometric hand and wrist designs in dark ink

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long dark hair covers her face with both hands, showing dark ornamental designs on the back of one hand, the wrist and a finger, plus a small arrow-like mark on the forearm. The designs use diamond, triangle and dotted line motifs in solid black ink with clean edges, and a delicate chain-like line runs from the hand down to the wrist. The warm, dim brick wall backdrop and low light create a moody composition, with the subject's bare shoulders visible at the edge of the frame.

Geometric Hand Forearm Diamond Triangle Dotted line Arrow Ornamental Woman Hand Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The survey book came to me in a biscuit tin with the lid taped down, and the first thing I learned from it was that my aunt Ruth had never once drawn a straight line. Every boundary in the Calder valley is dotted, she wrote on the flyleaf, because a boundary is a promise, not a wall. Diamonds marked the springs. Triangles marked the stones the sheep wouldn't pass.

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I took the tin to the reunion at the old grammar school in Hebden, mostly to show Mags Hollis the pencilled plan of the orchard we'd once dared each other to cross. She laughed at the diamonds, then stopped, because one dotted line ran off the edge of the page, and beside it Ruth had written: follow until the arrow stops.

Nobody at the reunion could say which arrow. We walked the car park with the book open between us, past the bike sheds that had been knocked down and rebuilt as flats, following a trail of small pencilled arrows that pointed at the chain-link fence, then the drain, then the bottom step of the old gym. Mags knelt and counted paces. Under the step, wrapped in oilcloth, sat a second tin, a brass key, and a note in Ruth's square capitals that said only: YOU WERE ALWAYS THE ONE WHO LOOKED UP.

I didn't open the second tin until the taxi had gone. The key fitted a gate on the moor road, and the gatepost had a diamond cut into its stone, and beyond the gate the dotted line went on, unbroken, in the same careful hand, toward a wall I had never once seen from the valley floor.