Single black jagged line tattoo curving in a shallow U shape across the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jagged black line on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black jagged line runs across the upper arm in a shallow U shape, rising at both ends and dipping sharply near the centre. The line has an uneven, broken edge with small irregular kinks along its length. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the arm fills most of the frame against a plain background.

Upper arm Zigzag Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, you lot, and I'll tell you about the night the road under Ardwick decided to open. It was past the midnight bell at St Clement's, and the lamplighter, Old Tobias Rhee, was walking home with his ladder over one shoulder when he felt the cobbles lift beneath him like a sleeper turning over.

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He didn't run. A lamplighter never runs. He stood still and watched a line split the setts, black and ragged, starting at the gasworks wall and zigzagging east toward the Mersey. It dipped sharp under the tram rails, then rose again on the far side as if it had thought better of going further. Every kink in it had a name in his head: the kink by the tripe shop, the kink where the Hollins boy broke his wrist, the long dip beneath the bridge where the fog sat thickest.

By morning the crack had closed, leaving only a dark seam that the council men swore was tar. But Tobias knew where to look. Each night after that he lit the gas lamps along the seam himself, one by one, until the whole length glowed like a string of pearls someone had dropped in the gutter.

Mind you, the council took him off the rota in March. Said a man who lit the streets for a crack in the road was no use to anybody's budget. So he kept it up himself, with a ladder and a tin of paraffin, every night until the frost went out of the ground. And if you walk down Ardwick Road tonight and see a small old man bent over a lamp at two in the morning, don't ask him what he's doing. He's keeping the city from splitting along the old line.