Black and grey blackwork tattoo of parallel lines, triangles and bands covering the back of a hand, fingers and forearm.

Geometric lines and triangles across hand and forearm

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand and forearm, with the back of the hand and fingers covered in parallel vertical lines and a band of triangles running down the centre. The pattern continues up the wrist onto the forearm, where wider bands of triangles and stripes wrap around the arm above a horizontal border. The work is in solid black ink on pale skin against a black background, with crisp, even linework and no colour.

Blackwork Geometric Hand Forearm Line Stripe Triangle Geometric pattern Band Hand Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's daughter had counted the lines on the cutting wall so often that she could recite them in the dark. Forty-one seams of grey slate ran down the face above the ponds at Tallow Gill, and each one, she said, was a road the water had chosen. Her father had laughed at that. He laughed less when the pumps failed in the wet spring and the men came up the hill with lamps and no answers.

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It was Mabon Rees who brought the ink. He had been a sailor once and had come back with a box of needles and a way of pricking patterns into skin that the village women feared and bought anyway. He came to the surveyor's house on a Sunday and asked for the girl by name, because the men said she had the steadiest hand with a ruler. He wanted her to draw the seams on him, from wrist to fingertip, so the water would know him for one of its own.

She drew them with a pencil and a straightedge, pale line by pale line, and Mabon sat without speaking while the needle went over every mark. Between the stripes he set triangles, the way the old slate roof of the chapel was cut, and at the wrist he wrapped a band of them around like a cuff. When it was done the hand looked like something the cutting wall had grown.

That October the water came down the Gill and found the seams exactly where she had counted them. It ran off the sheet-stone and away, dry at the pumphouse door. Mabon walked the cutting with his sleeve pushed up, and no one asked him why his hand was black to the knuckle.