Fine line tattoo of a rectangle of evenly spaced vertical black lines on the inner forearm of a person wearing a grey t-shirt and dark jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Parallel vertical lines on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a narrow rectangle made of about a dozen thin, evenly spaced vertical black lines running along the inner forearm towards the wrist. The linework is crisp and uniform, with no shading, and the lines fade slightly at the edges of the block. The photograph shows only black ink on pale skin against a dark red wall, with the wearer's hand open and two rings visible.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Line Stripe Rectangle Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger had forty-one columns and I had never once been allowed to leave a column half filled. Mr Abernethy taught me that on my first morning at the cooperage in Lowestoft, when I was fifteen and thought a pencil was a pencil. Every barrel that came off the cart got a line, every line got a stave number, and every stave number went down in the book in the same hand, as straight as the grain it came from. When the foreman died in March they gave me his stool and his brass rule, and I found out the rule had been ground down on one edge from years of pressing it against the page.

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The trouble started with the Dutch order. Two hundred hogsheads, due by the twelfth, and the count in the book came out one barrel short of the count on the dock. I went through the lines three times. Each one was clean, each one matched its stave, and still the sum refused to close. On the third night I sat with the lamp turned low and ran the rule down the margin, one stroke for every barrel I could account for, and when I reached the bottom I saw that the strokes made a narrow block of their own, eleven or twelve fine marks side by side, like the gaps between planks on a deck seen from above.

The missing barrel was on the wrong side of the yard, under a tarpaulin, where Abernethy had stored a cask of his own brewing and never written it down. He had kept it for himself, the way he kept most things, in pencil that rubbed away. I counted it, wrote it in, and ruled a line beneath it so the column closed. Then I took my own pen and drew the same block on the inside of my wrist, one stroke per barrel, so that whenever I turned my hand over I could see the books balanced.