Red and black harlequin diamond pattern wrapping around the forearm near the elbow, in a geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black harlequin diamonds on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pattern of red and black diamonds, some plain and some divided into smaller squares, wraps around the outer forearm towards the elbow. The shapes are filled with solid colour and soft shading, with a slight gloss, and the edges are crisp, so the design looks more like an airbrushed or temporary design than a traditional tattoo. The diamonds follow the curve of the arm, filling most of the frame against a pale wall.

Geometric Forearm Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lock gate, the pair of you, it bites. Sit nearer the stove, Tobias, and I'll tell you how the harlequin came to be sewn, since you've been pestering me since Braunston.

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Ada Pickering, who kept the wardrobe on the narrowboat Lark, had one bolt of red wool and one of black, and neither was enough. The red came off the back of a bankrupt regiment's officers' coats. The black was a funeral draper's offcut from Stoke. The company had spent its shillings on lock keepers and a new bridle for the horse, so when Joss Marrable, the lead clown, needed a suit for the Tuesday show in Leicester, Ada cut what she had.

She laid the diamonds out on the cabin table with the shears she usually reserved for sheep fleece. Every point had to meet its neighbour straight along the seam, or the whole thing looked drunk. She worked by paraffin lamp while the boat sat still in the cutting, frogs going at it outside, and Joss lay on the coal box reciting his fall from the bridge until the words wore smooth as river pebbles. Some diamonds she split into four little squares, because she'd come up short and wouldn't admit it.

On the Monday night the roof leaked over the table. The black bled a grey tide into the red, and she swore at it, then swore at herself for swearing. By morning the suit was blotched like a sunset that had gone wrong. Joss put it on anyway, and in Leicester the audience roared at the blotches as if they'd been planned, and nobody ever asked why the little squares looked so cheerful.

Ada kept the one offcut, a red diamond still stiff with rain, folded in the tin with the ticket stubs. Whenever the weather turns, she says, you can feel it warm through the paper, and that's how you know the show is still going on somewhere.