Black and grey fine line tattoos on an upper arm: a shaded polyhedron with animals and lettering, a diagram of hands on axes, and an engraved multi-tool below.

Polyhedron, hands diagram and pocket knife on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three separate engraved-style tattoos run down the upper arm. The top design is a shaded polyhedron ringed by small animals and lettering, the middle shows hands above a dashed geometric grid with numbers and axes, and the lowest is an open multi-tool. The work uses fine black linework with grey shading and no colour, and the designs are spaced evenly along the arm.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Hand Grid Axe Number Lettering Leopard Animal

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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

The rain came sideways off the car park at half past ten, and by eleven the gutter under my trestle was running like a weir. I sell old instruments on a Saturday: slide rules, brass dividers, a set of drawing compasses missing one leg. People shelter under the awning and leave with something they couldn't have explained wanting.

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A woman in a wet coat lifted a pocket knife from the velvet tray and asked how many tools it had. I said I'd never counted, which was a lie, because I had counted nineteen for the listing and written twenty-one out of optimism. She opened the saw, then the awl, then the little file that folds behind the corkscrew, turning each one under the grey light like a jeweller. Her grandfather had carried one just like it to the allotments every spring, she said, and it had never once been used to open a tin.

Then she unfolded a sheet from her coat. Pencilled on it was a sphere of twelve faces, a dashed grid, an axis or two, and four hands held up in a row, fingers bent as if counting in a schoolroom. Along the bottom someone had written the numbers one to four in a careful hand. She asked whether I knew what the hands were for. I said I thought they were for counting to sixteen without a calculator. She laughed and said that was what her father had told her, and that he had been wrong about nearly everything except that.

She paid with coins wrapped in a bus ticket and left the sheet on the counter. When the rain thinned I held it up to the light. The twelve faces sat exactly over the grid, the way a thing does when someone has spent a long time making it fit. I put it in the cash tin with the change, and the knife lay in its folded case, unopened, on her side of the counter.