Fine line black triangle tattoo with overlapping ends on the inner forearm, close to the wrist, against a dark blue wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open triangle on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black outline of a triangle sits on the inner forearm, close to the wrist. The triangle is drawn with thin, even lines, and its corners overshoot slightly where the strokes meet. The plain skin tone and dark blue wall behind the arm make the black linework stand out clearly.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Triangle Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trig pillar on Skerra had been cracked since before my grandfather was born, and every spring the wind dragged a little more grit out of its base. My job that May was to walk the three stations that made up the old triangulation, carrying a theodolite in a leather case that smelled of machine oil and wet wool. Nobody on the mainland had asked for the survey. The council wanted to know whether the north shore was still sliding into the sea, and the only way to tell was to measure the same three points against each other until the numbers stopped lying.

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Old Ruairidh kept the logbook at the harbour office. He had drawn the triangle in it in 1961, three sightlines ruled in pencil between the stations, and he had never once closed them. The corners ran past each other by a finger's width, he said, because a line drawn to a thing you cannot quite reach always overshoots. I thought he was being poetic until I stood on the north station with the instrument at my eye and saw the tower on Gealan Mor sitting exactly where the paper said it would, a hair left of where my own pencil wanted it.

On the last evening I climbed to the south point to take the final bearing. The cloud lifted off the sea for ten minutes and I saw the whole shape laid out in the water below, three islands pinned like the corners of a child's drawing, with the tide running clean between them. I wrote down the angles, folded the book, and walked back down in the dusk knowing the north shore had moved two metres since 1961 and that the triangle still closed, just, as near as the sea would let it.