Close-up of a small, fine line ankh tattoo in dark ink on the upper arm, with a hand with coral nails holding the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small ankh tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small ankh symbol in thin, dark single-needle linework sits on the upper arm, roughly in the centre of the frame. The skin around it is smooth and pale, and the background is softly out of focus with blurred purple and white light spots. The composition is close and intimate, with a hand with coral painted nails resting on the arm at the lower edge.

Fine line Upper arm Ankh Symbol Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old Kingston Black had come down in the gale on the Tuesday, and by Thursday Dad had sawn it into rounds and stacked them under the cart shed like coins. Nan wanted a scion from the one high branch that had survived, the branch nobody had reached since the war. I climbed the ladder with a folding knife in my teeth and a damp sack tucked into my belt.

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The symbol was the thing I kept thinking about. Nan had drawn it for me on the back of a seed catalogue: a teardrop balanced on a cross, like a key somebody had bent to fit a lock nobody remembered. She said the old Egyptians carved it for breath and for the river, and that her grandmother had carried the cuttings over from Somerset in a biscuit tin, which I have never been able to check. I cut a sliver of green wood, pale and wet inside, and slid it under the bark of a rootstock, then bound the join with grafting tape while the wasps circled the windfalls.

Late August light lay low over the Malverns, and the whole orchard smelled of cider and crushed grass. Nan pressed the tape flat with her thumb and said the graft would take or it wouldn't, and either way I would know by Christmas. I asked her how I would know. She said a graft that holds does not look like anything at all. It just stops being a seam.

Nan went into the hospice in October. I went back up the ladder alone in November, unwound the tape and found the wood had knitted to the stock, a line so faint I had to tilt my head to the window to see it. I left the spent tape hanging on the fence post for the wasps, and I walked home through the bare rows with my hands in my pockets, not checking anything.