Black and grey forearm tattoo of a tall grid-panelled device with small icons, a blue top bar, and dotwork florals and a swirling line, sitting on the inner forearm.

Grid device and floral filigree on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a tall rectangular device with a grid of small icons, topped by a blue bar, framed by a curling stem line. Behind it, dotwork shading and ornamental leaves and flowers fill the lower forearm. Fine outlines and stippled shading give a black and grey finish, with the blue top bar as the only colour accent. The design is centred on the forearm and runs from just below the elbow to the wrist.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Grid Icon Swirl Flower Leaves Filigree

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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 lift in Thornbury House has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the handset in your coat pocket, its grid of small pictures pressing into your hip. Nobody on the estate uses phones like this any more. Yours came from a car boot sale for two pounds, and the blue bar along its top still glows when you press it, like a window someone forgot to shut.

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Mrs Okonedo on the ninth floor has been texting you in icons for a month, because her eyes are going and the buttons are big. A cup means tea at hers. A little house means come up. A wilted flower, which she chose after long thought, means she is poorly and you should bring soup. You have learned her grammar the way you learned the dotted pattern on the hallway carpet, by feel and by habit.

Tonight the screen shows one square filled in black, then a tiny bell, then nothing. You stand on the landing with the stairwell smelling of bleach and listen. Her door is open a crack, light spilling across the lino like a dropped ribbon.

You knock with your knuckles, not the phone. She calls out that she has been up since five and only pressed the wrong key. You sit on her kitchen step while she tells you about the flowers on her curtains, and when you finally press the blue bar again, it lights up a small island in your palm before you pocket it.