Fine line black tattoo of a mathematical equation in a serif font on the upper arm.

Mathematical equation on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo of a mathematical equation written in a serif typeface, reading (x² + y² − 1)³ − x²y³ = 0, across the skin of an arm. The linework is thin and even, rendered in solid black ink with no shading. The text runs horizontally across the centre of the frame against a plain pale skin background with dark fabric at the edges.

Fine line Upper arm Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane had been sent to the edge of Coldharbour Wood with a theodolite, a sack of wooden pegs and a letter from the Parish Council that used the word resolve four times. The dispute concerned a hollow beneath the oaks where the ground dipped in a shape nobody could agree on. Farmer Pell swore it was a bowl fit for pigs to wallow in. The vicar swore it was a heart. The council wanted a figure it could minute.

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She spent three mornings pacing the rim, driving a peg at every quarter turn and writing the readings in a ledger with a pencil she kept sharp with a penknife. On the fourth morning the numbers would not sit still as a bowl. She dug out the schoolroom formula her mother had copied onto the back of a seed packet, a circle raised to the third power, a cubed cross term taken away from it, the whole set equal to nothing, and she laid the pegs against its curve one by one. They fitted. The bowl was not a bowl. It had a point at the top where the two lobes met, and a dip at the base that a pig could not have made.

Pell came up the path with his dog and a grievance ready in his mouth. She showed him the line of pegs running round the hollow, then the sum on the back of the seed packet, and he read it slowly with his lips moving. He asked her to round the figures in his favour. She told him that a curve had no favourites and that the council could take its question elsewhere.

That summer the bracken closed over every peg except the one at the cusp, which the foxes kept dragging back to the same spot. Pell stopped mentioning pigs. The vicar put the shape on the parish notice board, and nobody asked whose hand had drawn it.