Fine line tattoo of several overlapping pentagon outlines in black ink on the forearm, with a white trainer visible beside the arm.

Overlapping pentagon outlines on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows four pentagon outlines of slightly different sizes and angles, layered over one another so that they form an irregular star-like pattern. The linework is thin, even and solid black, with no shading or fill, and the open centre of the design shows bare skin. The arm fills most of the frame against a pale background, with a white shoe at the right edge.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Geometric shape Outline

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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

Dear Hal, the templates arrived on Tuesday wrapped in oilcloth, four of them, and not one agrees with the others. Dad cut them from ash in the loft above the net shed, each a pentagon a little larger than the last, each pinned at a different angle, as if he had tried to make a star and kept losing his temper with the corners.

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I laid them on the bench under the lamp and traced round them in pencil. Where the outlines cross, the wood has worn pale from his thumbs. The open middle is the only part he never touched. Mrs Probert at the chandlery says he told her the empty centre was where the boats went out from, and that a shape is only honest when it leaves room for whatever it is meant to hold. I thought that was nonsense until I measured the gap. It is exactly the width of the harbour mouth at low water.

Last night I laid the four outlines over the bay chart and the crossings fell on the Scar, the rock that took the Mary Ann in '61. I rang the harbour master at eleven. He said they had been meaning to mark it for years and asked where I had got the angles. I told him from a dead man's offcuts. I have not slept properly since, and I am not sure whether that is because I have found something or because I wanted to find something.

I am posting the templates back to you with this letter. Keep the smallest one. You always were the one who could hold a line steady. Come home at Easter and we will fix the buoy together, and you can tell me which corner he got wrong. Your loving sister, Ruth.