Black and grey dotwork and geometric line tattoo of an iceberg on the inner forearm, with the shaded peak above a horizontal waterline and the submerged section outlined below.

Iceberg on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of an iceberg across the forearm, with a stippled dotwork peak rising above a straight horizontal line that marks the waterline. Below the line, the submerged ice is drawn in bold black angular outlines with no shading. The image is a close crop of the arm against a plain light background, with a dark top and jeans at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mountain Facet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brannoc's boat was the last one left in Tallow Sound, and his daughter Essie wanted it more than she wanted her supper. Every grey morning she watched the ice come down from the north, white peaks standing out of the water like the backs of sleeping dogs. The old people said each one was a village folded up and sent south to be remembered. Nobody in Scarrow believed that, but nobody could say what the rest of it was.

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One spring a berg grounded in the mouth of the harbour and would not move. Brannoc went out in the dark with a lamp and a coil of tarred rope. He came back at dawn with his hands bleeding and would only say that the sea side of the ice was cut in straight black lines, edges sharp as a knife, and every line ran down into cold water where no light had reached. Essie asked what was down there. He said, the rest of it, and went to bed.

She rowed out herself the next week with a flask of tea and a hook. The peak was soft under the sun, speckled grey like a flint wall, but the water was clear enough to show the facets beneath. They went down and down, each one a door with no handle. She counted nine before the cold got into her wrists, then turned the boat for home. Behind her the berg groaned and rolled a little, the way a sleeper turns over, and the harbour bell began to ring with nobody at the rope.

Essie kept the ferry after that. Each spring she rowed to the same berg and dropped a stone over the side, counting the lines it passed on the way down. When Brannoc died she found his tide book, and in its margins were thirty years of the same counts, each one a little higher than the last.