Black and white photo of a small outlined downward-pointing triangle tattoo on the side of the ribs, under a raised arm.

Outlined triangle on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple triangle with a point facing downward is drawn in a solid black outline on the side of the torso, beneath a raised arm. The linework is even and crisp with no shading inside the shape. The photograph is black and white, with strong light on the skin and dark shadow in the background, and the tattoo sits near the centre-left of the frame.

Geometric Ribs Triangle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, you lot, and mind the kettle. The Mary Lilian was lying at Braunston the winter her skipper Tom Abbott took to drinking his tea with the lamp out, and that's where I'll start, because that's where the trouble started.

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Abbott had a habit of chalking a little mark on the lock beam before he went through, same as his father had, a triangle stood on its point like a bucket turned over. The lock-keepers asked him what it meant. He said it was for water, that water wants a way down and the triangle shows it the path. Daft talk, we all thought, until the spring the Oxford cut ran dry in a single week and nobody could say why.

Abbott went up the towpath with a spade and a sack of lime and found a culvert choked with a drowned ewe and forty years of rubbish. He cleared it on his own, knee-deep and swearing, and when the water came back down the cut it ran clear as glass. Next morning there was a new chalk mark beside his on the lock beam, drawn by a hand nobody recognised, and the triangle was empty inside, just its outline, the way he always drew it. Nobody ever owned to that mark. Some say it was his wife. Some say it was the water itself, keeping its own accounts.

So if you ever see that little black point chalked on a lock beam, leave it be, and mind your step on the wet stones.