Fine-line black geometric tattoo of a shaded hexagon with a long vertical line and small cross mark, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric hexagon and line on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black tattoo runs down the inner forearm, with a hexagonal shape at the top built from fine lines and stippled shading. A thin straight line extends from the base of the shape to a small cross-shaped mark near the wrist. The ink is black on pale skin, set against a plain light background with a dark sleeve at the right edge.

Geometric Fine line Dotwork Forearm Hexagon Geometric shape Line Cross Diamond

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sounding line was already running out when Mr Ruddock handed it to me, and I remember thinking the lead at its end was too small to matter. It was a six-sided weight of black iron, shaped so it would not roll across the deck, with a little cross of cord seized to the shackle so the line could not slip through a wet hand. Forty fathoms of tarred hemp, knotted every few feet, and the whole thing smelled of cold tea and paraffin.

Keep reading

We were thirty-one days out of Hull on the Caddis Dawn, bound for Montevideo with coal in her holds, and I was the cook's boy who had been promoted to the line because the bosun said I had the arms for it. Ruddock taught me the old way. You feel the lead touch, you read the knots by your fingers in the dark, and you believe the line over the chart every time, because charts are only other men's guesses made in warmer rooms.

The fog came down off the River Plate on a Tuesday. We sounded at four bells and the line came back at eleven fathoms, where the chart said sixty. Ruddock took the wet end from me without a word and held it up to the lantern. Stuck in the tallow of the lead was a flake of pale shell and grey sand that had not been there a watch before. He pocketed it, ordered the engines stopped, and wrote in the log: sixty fathoms, sand, as charted.

I asked him why he had lied in the book. He said the book was for the owners and the line was for us. Years later, in a flat above a chip shop in Leith, I still reach for a rope that is not there, and my hand closes around nothing but the shape of six sides.