Black and grey realism tattoo of a pencil with a metal ferrule and eraser, shaded to look three-dimensional, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single pencil runs vertically down the forearm, shown from the eraser at the top to the sharpened tip at the bottom. The ferrule and body are shaded with smooth gradients and highlights to suggest metal and wood, with a small cast shadow along one side. The image is greyscale and centred on the tattoo against a soft, blurred background.

Realism Forearm Pencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone at kilometre marker forty-one had been moved twice in the night, or so Halvorsen claimed, and we had until the frost to settle it. I sat on the tailgate with the theodolite cooling in its box and the HB pencil in my fingers, the one Mrs Okafor at the Kessock office had pressed on me the week before I left, saying the Ministry paid for pens but she would not see me reduce a survey to scratching numbers with a biro that skipped.

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The border ran through a dry wash, a line of tussock on one bank and a fence post on the other, and the treaty said only 'along the thalweg', a word nobody in either village could spell. I measured it with a chain that rattled, wrote figures in the margin of a map that had been folded and unfolded until the creases went grey, and every time I erased a number the rubber left a smear that looked, from a distance, like a second river.

On the fourth morning the two commissioners met us at the cairn. Halvorsen's man wanted the line four metres east, the other side wanted it where the water had run in 1961. I held up my pencil and asked whether either of them had ever tried to rub out a mountain. They laughed, which was the first thing that had gone right all week, and we agreed to pencil the line in provisionally, to be inked later by people who would never see the wash.

I sharpened the pencil until the stamp on the barrel was a stub and the lead a grey thorn, then drew the line one last time in the dust of the tailgate so the chain men could see it. When the frost came the wind took the tussock, the post and every pencil mark, but the ink in Geneva held, and it was the pencil I thought of, pressed lightly to the paper, doing its quiet work and then going blunt.