Black linework tattoos including an eye and a star cover the forearm and upper arm of a driver whose hand rests on a wood-wrapped steering wheel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Linework tattoos on a forearm at the wheel

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A driver grips a wood-wrapped steering wheel of an older car, with the tattooed forearm and upper arm in the foreground. The tattoos are sketchy black linework with a small eye, a star and abstract line shapes, and some sections appear lightly shaded. The palette is black and grey against the warm interior, and the framing is taken from the passenger side, cropping the face.

Forearm Upper arm Eye Star Line drawing Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The car had done eleven thousand miles since her brother left it in the yard behind the village shop, and every one was written in the back of the service book in his cramped capitals. Ruth read the entries at the kitchen table while the engine ticked outside as it cooled. Dusk, Fourteen Mile Oak, bear left at the stone. Don't trust the low bridge after rain. The odometer figures ran on like a train timetable, each one a little further from the last.

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The wheel was braided leather, worn pale in two crescents where hands had gripped it for years. Pencilled on the sun visor was a small star, and in the top corner of the windscreen someone had scratched a tiny eye with a thumbnail. When she asked about it at the funeral, Tomas had only said the eye was for watching the road when the headlamps gave up. She had thought it a joke until the first night she drove the lanes out to Lower Hatch and the lamps did exactly that, flickering at the edge of the trees.

She found the stone where he said it would be, moss over the lettering, and bore left. The forest closed in like a held breath. Near the bridge a woman stood at a gate with a paraffin lantern and didn't seem surprised to see the car. "You're the sister," she said, and handed through the window an envelope with a star pressed into the wax. Inside was a single line in his hand: Keep the eye open and come home by the lamp.

Ruth turned the wheel slowly, feeling the leather warm under her palms. Ahead, past the last of the oaks, one window glowed yellow in the cottage where he used to leave the light on for her.