Black and grey fine line tattoo of overlapping rotated squares on the upper arm, in a black and white photograph.

Nested squares on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black outline tattoo shows several squares of decreasing size, rotated and overlapping so they step inward toward a small square at the centre. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the lines sit clearly against the skin. The black and white photograph is taken close up, with the arm filling most of the frame and the tattoo placed near the middle.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Square Geometric shape Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the gull. Your great-grandfather never once drew a straight line in his life, and I'll tell you why, because the captain's boy asked me the same question in the Bay of Biscay.

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The Marigold was three weeks out of Hull with a hold full of salt and no wind at all. The sea lay flat as a dropped plate. Ned Rennie, the mate, knelt on the forecastle with a stick of chalk and scratched a big square into the planks. Then he turned it a little, stepping each corner round, and drew another square inside it, and another, until there was a small one in the middle no bigger than the lid of a biscuit tin.

"That's the sandbank off the Azores," he said, tapping the centre, "and that's us. Every shift of wind we'll tack round it, and every lap we come in tighter, because the breeze never holds long enough to take us clear." The captain laughed and called him a poet. Then the wind came back from the wrong quarter, and they did exactly as the chalk said, circling, each lap closer than the last, until the lookout saw the water turn pale green above the shallows and the anchor went down in that small square, over sand no wider than a kitchen table.

The chalk was gone by morning, scrubbed off by the holystone. Ned never forgot the shape of it, though. He drew it on every letter he sent home, always with a dot in the middle, and his wife, who could not read a chart to save her life, knew exactly what the dot meant. It was the place where we stopped.