Fine line black tattoo of the New York skyline with the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, with cursive script beneath, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

New York skyline with script on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three photographs show the same wrist tattoo from different angles, an outline of the New York skyline with the Statue of Liberty on the left and the Empire State Building rising in the centre. Cursive script runs along the base of the skyline, partly legible and partly cut off by the frame. The linework is thin and even in black ink, with no shading or colour, and the design is set against a plain skin background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Skyline Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hetty Marsh had sold her late husband's pocket watch to pay for the ferry, and she stood at the rail with the empty chain still looped through her buttonhole, refusing to look at the skyline until the boat had properly turned. Her son Arthur had written only twice from Manhattan, both times in pencil, both times signing off with the same crooked line along the bottom of the page: rule your own roof, Mum. She had never known what he meant by it.

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The deckhand, a boy called Vic with tar on his knuckles, leaned beside her and nodded at the green lady in the harbour. 'Looks smaller from the water,' he said. 'Everyone says that.' Hetty said nothing. Then the grey stacks of the lower town rose through the haze, and the needle of the Empire State pricked the sky like a pin through paper, and she remembered the napkin Arthur had folded into her coat the day he left Liverpool. He had drawn this very view on it in one unbroken pen line, never lifting the nib, and told her that was how you knew a thing was true: you could follow it with your eyes shut.

She found him at a tailor's on Mott Street, bent over a sewing machine, his hair too long and his cheeks thinner than she liked. He did not look up at first. She laid the napkin on the cutting table and smoothed it flat with both hands. His needle stopped mid-seam. 'You kept it,' he said. 'I kept it,' she said, 'and I think you need it more than I do.'

He took her wrist then, gently, the way he used to when he was small and wanted to show her a beetle, and traced a finger along the pale skin there. 'Then you'll wear it,' he said, reaching for his pen. 'Hold still, Mum. It only stings a little, and it never comes off.' She held still.