Two small matching black dot and dash tattoos sit on the inner forearms of two people standing side by side.

Matching dot and dash tattoos on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand side by side, showing small matching tattoos on their inner forearms. Each design is made of short black dashes and dots arranged in three rows, drawn with crisp, solid fine linework and no shading. The ink is black on light skin, and the close framing centres the marks against the striped top and light vest on either side.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The key clicked in the cramped cabin long after the watch should have changed, and Ada Pryce kept her hand on it while the Cormorant wallowed through the Bay of Biscay. Outside the porthole the swell was the colour of wet slate. Somewhere below her, sixty tons of coal shifted with every roll, and the mate had asked her twice to stop listening for it.

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The message came from her brother Tom, who was two thousand miles north on a whaler that had gone quiet off Greenland. Three words crawled back through the static, each letter a small stutter she knew better than her own handwriting: DRY MATCH SAFE. He had taught her the code at the kitchen table when she was nine, tapping it onto the oilcloth with a teaspoon while their mother pretended not to hear.

Ada copied the words onto the back of a chart, then wrote them again in the pattern they had invented as children, three rows, one for the sea, one for the land and one for the things neither of them would say aloud. Tom had laughed at it then. When he came home from his first voyage he had gone straight to a shop on Hessle Road and had the three rows put on the inside of his arm, crooked and blue-black, and made her promise to do the same.

The Cormorant limped into port on the third morning. Ada stood on the quay with the wind pulling at her coat, and when Tom came down the gangway with his duffel bag he didn't say anything at all. He just took her wrist and tapped out one word with a single finger, dot, dash, dot, the way they had always done it.

Safe.

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