Forearm tattoo of red cross-stitch motifs inside black outlined diamond shapes, in a geometric folk embroidery style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black cross-stitch pattern on forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The image shows a forearm tattoo made up of diamond and lozenge shapes, each outlined in black zigzag lines. Inside the outlines are red cross-stitch motifs resembling embroidered folk patterns, with small black dots at some stitch points. The design is solid, with no shading, and the bold red and black ink sits against a dark background that frames the arm.

Geometric Forearm Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The porter at the back gate of the Dunmore Street depot let me in past eleven because he knew my mother, and because the textile room on the fourth floor was the only place in the city where a cloth could be looked at without someone asking what it was worth. I had a runner of linen under the lamp, worked in cross-stitch with red wool, its diamonds edged in a black zigzag that had been couched down by hand. Somebody had counted every stitch before they sewed it.

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I counted too. Lozenges stacked in twos, a small cross set inside each one, four dots at the arms like cloves. The catalogue card was written in faded biro and said only 'Lipa, Sunday'. My grandmother had called the same motif the yard gate, because you walked through it to reach the well. I turned the cloth over and found the knots tied in the short double twist she used when she wanted a thread to hold through a long winter.

At half past one the timer clicked and the room went dark except for the lamp. I sat with the runner across my knees and traced the black border with one finger, and it came to me that the zigzag was not decoration at all but a path, one unbroken line that started at the top diamond and returned to it without lifting the needle. You could follow it like a street if you did not hurry.

I drew the pattern out on squared paper before the porter came back, every red cross and black dot in its place, and took the sheet home in my coat. On the kitchen table I laid it beside the photograph of the old gate. They matched to the last dot. In the morning I would ring the depot and ask them to log the runner under her name, though nobody had asked me to, and the thread would wait in its drawer a little longer.