Black and white photo of a small fine line ladder tattoo on a forearm.

Ladder tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a forearm with a small ladder design in the centre, drawn with two horizontal rails and five evenly spaced rungs. The linework is thin and even with solid black ink and no shading. The plain grey skin and dark background keep the simple design as the clear focus of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Count the rungs before you put your weight on them, Tomasz says, the way his father taught him, because the ladder down to the hold of the Marigold has been painted so many times that the paint hides the cracks. There are five between the deck and the bilge, and by the third trip down you know them by their give. The top one sings when the swell lifts the hull. The third one is loose at the left rail.

Keep reading

The fleet is forty boats out of Lowestoft in a dirty February, and the skipper wants the nets mended before the tide turns. You work below with a torch clamped in your teeth, splicing twine by feel while the water slaps the planks an arm's length away. Nobody talks much down there. Tomasz hums the same three bars of something he heard on a Polish station, and every time the boat rolls you hear the ladder knock against the frame like someone asking to be let in.

On the last night the wind drops and the harbour lights come on one by one across the water. You climb up for air and find the skipper sitting on the top rung with a flask, looking at the town. He doesn't turn round. He says the ladder was his grandfather's, cut from ash in a yard that no longer exists, and that a man can tell how long he has been at sea by how many rungs he has worn smooth. You put your hand on the rail and count. Four of them shine like old coins.

Before dawn you go down to the hold once more, though you don't need to. You run your thumb over the fifth rung, the one nobody ever stands on, and it is still rough.

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