Two fine line tattoos on the inner wrists: a thin horizontal rainbow stripe on the left wrist and a short vertical black line on the right, both shown with palms up.

Rainbow and black line tattoos on wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are held palms up, with a thin horizontal rainbow stripe on the inner wrist of the left arm and a short vertical black line on the inner wrist of the right arm. The linework is crisp and delicate, and the rainbow band is filled with soft colour while the vertical line is a single dark grey-black tone. The plain white background and soft top-down lighting keep the focus on the two small tattoos.

Fine line Forearm Rainbow Line Wrist

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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 black mark went on the back-kitchen door the morning after Tommy Crane came up from the Hartley face with his lamp still burning. Dad drew it with a stub of coal, one upright stroke, because coal was the only pencil the pit allowed us. Nobody in Ashgrove needed telling what it counted. Every shift he came up clean, another line went on the door, and Mam scrubbed them off on Fridays and never once asked him to stop.

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My sister Nell had other ideas. That winter, while the lockout dragged on and the soup pot got thinner, she unpicked Mam's old embroidery silks and cut strips from a blue Co-op ribbon she'd bought with her Christmas money. She sewed them into bunting for the street party, red for the blood, orange for the furnaces, yellow for the lamps, green for the fields none of us had seen, blue and violet for whatever came after. She ran out of violet and used a strip of Dad's shirt instead, and he pretended not to notice.

The day the gates were chained for good, Nell hung the bunting from lamp post to lamp post across the terrace. Dad stood underneath it with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ribbon rather than the headstocks. "Give us the coal," he said. I handed it over, and he took hold of my arm, pressed his thumb to the soft inside of my wrist, and drew one short stroke there instead of on the door.

Nell laughed and said it looked like a full stop. Dad said it was the last day count, and the colours could go on the other side, where nobody would see them unless we held our hands out to somebody and asked them to look.