Black and white photo of a person's arm covered in parallel wavy black lines across the upper arm and forearm, with a city street behind.

Parallel wavy lines on an upper arm and forearm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a set of closely spaced, flowing black lines that wrap around the upper arm and down the forearm, following the curve of the limb. The lines are uniform in weight with no shading, creating a rhythmic, abstract pattern. The photograph is in black and white, with the subject's back and shoulder visible and a cobbled street and parked van behind.

Upper arm Forearm Wavy line Abstract Pattern

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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

My father kept the seam in the back of his rent book, because the colliery office would not let the plans leave the building. He drew it in pencil every Sunday: long wavy lines, packed as close as the grooves on a gramophone record, each one a band of coal that dipped a little further under Scarrow Row. He showed me how they bent round the hill the way water bends round a stone, and I thought it was the most careful thing a man could draw.

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The year the cracks came, Mr Pell arrived from the Board with a theodolite on a tripod and a face like a wet Monday. He walked the lines up and down the back lane, writing numbers in a notebook that never once looked at anybody. The council offered us a bungalow on the new estate beyond the bypass. My father folded the offer into quarters and put it behind the clock. He said he would leave when the last of the seam was out, and he meant the seam, not us.

He died before the last of it was out. The pit closed, the wheel was taken down, and the lines went with the paperwork into a box in a county archive I have never visited. I have his rent book now. In my flat above the launderette I pinned the page to the wall and went over the pencil with a biro, one line at a time, so the pattern would hold. Somewhere under the grass where Scarrow Row used to be, the ground is still settling along it, slow and exact, just as he drew it.