Black and grey photo of a small geometric tattoo on the inner forearm, showing a row of filled and outlined squares, circles, pentagons and triangles.

Row of filled and outlined shapes on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a forearm and hand resting against a dark surface. A short horizontal row of eight small geometric shapes sits on the forearm, alternating between solid and outlined squares, circles, pentagons and triangles. The crisp, even linework and the plain background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Geometric Forearm Square Circle Triangle Geometric shape Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board hung on the lock-keeper's hut at Stanwell Cut, eight painted tiles in a row, and Dilys had been told never to touch the third one. Her father had painted them himself the spring the canal company went bust: black squares, a black circle, a black pentagon, a black triangle, each followed by its own outline, the same shape drawn empty, as if someone had started to rub it out and lost heart.

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Every boat that came up from the river had to read the board before the gates would open. Solid, empty, solid, empty. A narrowboat called the Thrift misread it once, heading for the top gate with a coal barge behind, and the bargee's wife shouted something Dilys did not repeat to her mother. After that the rule was simple: follow the row from the left and you could not go wrong, because the row never changed, only the water did.

The autumn the river flooded the lower lock, the board stood under for three days. When the water dropped, Dilys scrubbed the tiles with a wire brush and found the outlines had held better than the fills. The black had bled into the grain, but the thin white rings were still sharp. She stood there with her sleeves rolled up, reading the shapes the way the boats did, left to right, and understood that the empty ones were the instructions, and the solid ones were only the places where somebody had stopped to wait.