Close-up of a red tattoo with black outlines and grey shading, showing an angular symbol with a central diamond, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red angular symbol on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold angular symbol with a central diamond sits on the skin, shaped like a stylised C with pointed spikes extending to the right. The design is filled with solid red ink, outlined in black, with grey shading along the edges that gives it a raised, dimensional look. The tattoo is centred on a plain pale arm against a white paper background.

Forearm Symbol Diamond Spike Geometric shape

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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 has been coming off the awnings of Coldharbour Market since six, and by the time you reach the last stall on the lane, the cardboard boxes of brass fittings have gone soft at the corners. The man behind the trestle table does not look up. He is cutting a sheet of red acrylic with a jigsaw, and the dust settles on your sleeve like pollen. He slides a flat disc across the table: a C-shaped hook of red, its three points flaring to the right, a diamond set in its belly like a window with the blind half drawn.

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He tells you it was a pawnbroker's mark, or it was before the rent went up, and nobody pays for the spikes any more. You turn the disc over. The back is pitted with the tiny bubbles of a bad pour. Someone once lost a fortune trying to get the red right, he says, and the trick is letting the grey bleed in along the edges so the whole thing looks lifted off the surface, as if it might come away in your hand.

You ask what it opens. He shrugs and wipes his hands on a rag that was white once. The gates on the old wharf, he says. He sold a hundred to a woman who ran a laundry, and she told him the only thing that ever came through her door after dark was the smell of starch. Rain drums harder on the tarpaulin. Somewhere a van reverses, beeping, and then stops.

You pay in exact coins, because he has already named the sum without checking the till. Walking back past the shuttered fishmongers, you hold the disc up to the streetlamp. The diamond catches the light and throws a small red square onto the wet pavement, and for a moment it looks like a door someone has left open for you.