Black and grey linework tattoo on a forearm showing an EDGE KEEP OFF sign, a child sitting on a ledge and a dog beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sign, child and dog on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wide tattoo runs along the inner forearm, showing a wooden signpost reading EDGE KEEP OFF on the left, a small seated figure at the edge of a ledge on the right, and a dog near the centre. The thin, uniform black linework has a vintage illustration feel, with light shading and no colour. The design sits horizontally across the arm against a plain pale background.

Forearm Sign Child Dog

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign went up the week after Mrs Pellow's goat went over the wall, and by Thursday the whole lane had read it aloud to one another. EDGE, it said, and underneath, in smaller paint that had already started to lift, KEEP OFF. Nobody had thought to tell the dog. I am the dog, and I have always believed a warning is only a suggestion pitched at the wrong height.

Keep reading

Hetty Marsh was nine and had the ledge to herself every afternoon, sitting with her boots dangling over the drop while she swept the dust from the rock with a feather brush her mother had sworn was for the parlour. She did not keep off. She kept her back very straight and told me the sign was meant for grown-ups who could not stop themselves, which I took as a compliment to dogs.

One Saturday the wind came up off the quarry and took her brush clean over the edge. It turned over once, bright as a moth, and settled on a shelf of grey stone where nobody could reach it without a rope. Hetty looked at it. Then she looked at me. I had already gone down the scree on my belly, the way a sensible dog does when a sensible girl asks him to fetch something he has no business fetching.

I carried it back up in my teeth, feathers and all, and laid it at her boots. She took it without a word and tapped it twice against the sign's crossbar, as if stamping a receipt. The paint has faded further since. The dust still gathers on the ledge, and every afternoon she sweeps it, and every afternoon I sit beside her, a little closer to the edge than the sign would like.