Two forearms held together showing a red geometric circular mesh tattoo across both arms, with black brushstroke and dotwork shading and small red crosses.

Red geometric mesh across two forearms

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pair of forearms are pressed together with the wrists facing the camera, carrying one large circular design made of red intersecting lines that spans both arms. Black brushstroke marks, fine dotwork shading and small red crosses surround the circle on the upper and lower forearms. The red linework stands out strongly against the black and grey shading and the pale skin, and the dark background keeps the focus on the arms.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Circle Cross Brushstroke Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in over Scarrow Head on the third night of the net-mending, and Ada Pell had the lattice half drawn on the back of the chart table when the lamp went out. She did not stop. Her father had taught her that a knot you could not see was still a knot if your hands remembered it. Her brother Tom held the two cuffs of the drift-net against the wall while she counted red thread through the mesh, the same madder-dyed thread their mother had used for the Michaelmas nets.

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"Round the circle," Tom said. "Like the buoy." She had spent a whole winter on that circle, forty-one spokes that crossed and recrossed and never met the rim in the same place twice. The small crosses were for the boats that had not come back, though she had inked them so tiny the children would take them for stitches. The black brushwork they had dragged from the stove soot, long strokes across the wrists until the paper gave up and the marks ran into the grain.

At four bells the foghorn answered from the south. They pressed their forearms together, the way their mother had shown them to test a bandage's pull, and felt the warmth come through the lattice. Somewhere past the breakwater a boat turned toward the sound, following a line that was only red thread and two pairs of hands.

Their father came down the shingle at dawn with a lantern, counting heads. He found the net drying on the rail, the circle complete and every spoke knotted. Nobody on the quay could say which of them had made it, and Ada never told him that the last knot had taken both of them to pull tight.