Black fine line and dotwork tattoo of nested triangles on a line with arrow ends, placed centrally on the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nested triangles with arrow line on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three nested triangles sits on a thin horizontal line with arrowheads at each end, centred on the upper back. The linework is fine and precise, with dotted and stippled shading inside the outer triangles and a solid black triangle at the centre. The image is in black and grey against pale skin, shot from behind with the subject's dark hair pulled up at the top of the frame.

Geometric Fine line Dotwork Back Triangle Arrow Line Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The theodolite had been sulking since breakfast, so Alwyn Cowle set the tripod down on the wet boards of the number four drift and swore at it gently. Behind him the lamp boys were already feeding the ponies, and the air smelt of wet stone and paraffin. 'Give it here,' said Ruth Ashdown, who had come down the pit in her father's boots because her father's knees had gone. She wiped the lens on her cuff, squinted, and handed it back without a word.

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The line they were following ran nine hundred yards under Hollin Fell, and it had to be straight. Every three chains they cut a mark into the rib: a short arrow pointing back toward the shaft, then another pointing on, so a man walking in the dark could tell which way was home and which way was the face. Ruth had drawn the mark on a scrap of pit-sheet the week before, three triangles stacked inside each other like a row of tents, the smallest one filled solid with ink. 'Why the black bit?' Alwyn had asked. 'That's where the line is true,' she said. 'Everything else is just looking after it.'

They reached the nine hundred yard mark a little after two. Alwyn sighted through the lens and the crosshairs sat dead on the centre of the solid triangle, which had never happened to him in twenty-two years of measuring. He took the chisel from his belt and cut the mark slowly, the outer triangle first, then the middle, and last of all the small dark one, pressing until the rock gave a faint ring.

Ruth held the lamp steady. When he looked up she was grinning the way she did when she had been right and did not want it said aloud. Somewhere far above them the cage bell rang twice, the signal that the men were coming up. 'Now we go home the proper way,' she said, and they walked back along their own arrows without needing the light at all.