Metallic gold and silver geometric bands and leaf designs on a forearm, shown in warm low sunlight.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Metallic geometric bands and leaves on forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm and wrist carry a set of metallic gold and silver designs, including stacked bands of quatrefoil lattice, chain links, triangles and leaf rows, plus two leaf shapes near the wrist. The motifs are flat metallic fills with fine outlines and no shading, and they read as bright gold and silver against the skin tone. The arm is angled diagonally across the frame in warm backlight, with long hair in the foreground and a red top at the bottom edge.

Geometric Forearm Leaves Geometric pattern Band Triangle Lattice

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every night the night sister at Coldharbour Ward walked the corridor with a lamp, and every night the shadows of the old window lattice fell across the floor in quatrefoil shapes, one after another, like coins laid out for someone to count. Nobody remembered who had put the lattice in. The porters said a stonemason's widow had carved it for her husband's ward when he was brought in with his chest burnt by the furnace, and that she sat by his bed until the window turned grey, then went home and never came back.

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Sister Abena did not believe in widows or lattices. She believed in the drug trolley and the observations chart, and in the forty-one minutes between the two o'clock round and the three o'clock round when nothing was supposed to go wrong. But in February a patient in bed seven, a stubborn old canal bargeman, told her that the chain links carved along the skirting were counting for him. Each link, he said, was a breath he owed the river, and he would not let them go slack.

She laughed, then she didn't. She sat with him and watched the sodium light from the car park move over the leaves in the ceiling rose, gold and then silver as the lamps flickered. At four she counted the lattice shadows on the floor and found eleven more than the window had. She rang for the registrar. The bargeman's pulse came back up under her fingers like water finding a lock.

In the morning the shadows had their proper number, and the bargeman asked for a cup of tea and his trousers. Abena swept a single curled leaf of gilt paint from the floor by bed seven and put it in her pocket, where it stayed all winter, bright against the lining, as if the ward had paid her in something it could afford to lose.