Black and white photo of a thin single line tattoo running from the wrist up the inside of a forearm, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single fine line along a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single unbroken black line runs from the wrist up the forearm and onto the back of the hand, with a second hand resting on a bare torso beside it. The line is very thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the photograph is in black and white. The plain background and soft lighting keep the focus on the line and the placement.

Fine line Forearm Hand Torso

Find an artist for this

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

My father drew track plans in a drawing office above Platform Four, and he never lifted his pen between the station and the goods yard. He said a line that stopped had lost its nerve. Most of his plans went into the bin after the Beeching cuts, but one he kept rolled in a cardboard tube under the stairs, a loop that would have swung the Ashby branch round the water tower and back onto the main line. It was never built.

Keep reading

When Mum died he unrolled it on the kitchen table and weighed the corners down with the sugar bowl and a pair of pliers. He told me to trace the whole route with one stroke, start to finish, no breaks. The pencil skipped on the old footbridge and I had to begin again at the water tower. I tried for most of an hour before I got it right, a single unbroken run that doubled back on itself without a join.

He didn't say well done. He laid his hand flat on the table beside mine, not touching, the way he used to rest it on a rail when a train came in under the roof. We sat like that until the kettle went cold.

I had the line inked years later, from wrist to the back of the hand, a single stroke with no shading and no join, because I wanted to carry the one thing he never finished. The loop was never built, but he never lifted the pen on the way out.