Woman seen from behind in a black backless bodysuit and blue jeans, showing a black and grey ornamental tattoo on her forearm.

Ornamental forearm tattoo, seen from behind

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark hair in two braids stands with her back to the camera against a grey textured wall. A black and grey ornamental tattoo with circular motifs and striped lines runs down her forearm, and only part of the design is visible. The image is a soft, evenly lit street-style shot with the tattoo as a secondary detail.

Blackwork Forearm Ornament Pattern Circle Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that creel closer and sit where the lamp can reach you, lad, for I'll not tell it twice. Up the coast at Scarrow there were eleven boats in the fleet, and old Hesketh's was the only one that never had a name painted on her bow. He painted rings instead, a stack of them, each drawn with a compass point the way you'd draw the ripples off a dropped stone.

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The winter the herring went north, the fleet laughed at him. They sailed for the banks where the catch had been and came home light. Hesketh stayed out past the Wrecker's Stones, where nobody cared to go, and his wife Nell sat at the mending board with her hands in the twine. She knotted the same pattern into every net she made, rings and then a row of tight stripes, the way the tide leaves its lines on the sand. Ask her why, and she'd only say, mind the stripes, Walter, they're for counting.

Then came the fog that stayed three days. There was no sound but the bell buoy and no light but gulls turning round and round above the water. Hesketh counted the stripes on the net drying across his deck, one for each swell he crossed, and counted the rings, one for each buoy he passed. When the fog lifted, the rocks were off his port side, close enough to spit on, and the net came up so heavy with silver that two men wept hauling it.

He never painted that bow again. Nell's board hangs in the fish house still, its knots gone black with salt. Put your hand to the stripes, lad, and tell me what you feel. That's the sea keeping count, and it has never once got a number wrong.