Black fine line ruler tattoo with numbers from 5 to 35 running down a forearm, held beside a perch fish.

Ruler tattoo on a forearm beside a perch

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm carries a thin black ruler tattoo with a vertical line and small numerals marked at intervals from 5 to 35. A hand holds a perch beside the arm, so the tattoo is used to show the fish's length. The image is in colour, with a green grassy and rocky outdoor background and the fish's orange fins as the only strong colour.

Fine line Forearm Number Fish Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Lord Measurer of Hollin Mere would not enter a fish in the ledger until it had been laid along my arm. The arm was the kingdom's rule. My grandmother pricked the marks into it with a sharpened quill and walnut ink the winter the old oak rule floated off in the flood, and since then the brown lines from five to thirty-five have settled every quarrel on the causeway about what was caught and what was merely boasted.

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That spring a boy named Tobin came up the causeway with a perch wrapped in dock leaves and swore it reached the thirty mark. I held the fish to my wrist as I always did. Its tail fell short of the twenties, and its red fins barely brushed the fifteen. Tobin's mother began to wail that the rule was a liar, and the crowd turned to look at me, because a rule is only as honest as the one who holds it up.

I had long suspected the ink was spreading. Each year the lines grew a little fatter, and the five had crept closer to the wrist. That evening I took a needle to the lowest marks and scraped at them with the back of a knife, then laid the perch down again. It was longer than before, and Tobin was right, though nobody but me would ever know the rule had changed to suit him.

In the morning the Lord Measurer entered thirty-one inches in the ledger, Tobin went home happy, and I sat on the causeway rubbing the new lines with lard, trying to remember which of them had been true. The river kept rising. Somewhere under the reeds, a perch the length of my forearm was swimming about with no one left to measure it.