Fine line black tattoo of the letter G, two angle brackets and a V on the inner forearm near the wrist, with the palm facing up.

Small letters and symbols on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo on the inner wrist shows a capital G, a right-pointing angle bracket, an upward-pointing caret and a V, set in a row. The lines are thin and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The photo is taken with the palm facing up against a pale tiled floor, and the tattoo sits near the centre of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Letter Symbol

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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

Dear Tom, the carrier brought your field book wrapped in oilcloth, and I have been turning its pages at the kitchen table like a thief. Mother says I should leave your papers be. But you wrote in that cramped pencil that you would be back before the harvest, and the harvest is in, and you are not.

Keep reading

Most of it is columns of figures for the drainage cut at Haddon Fen, which I cannot read and do not pretend to. Then, on the page for the eleventh, a row of marks standing alone: a G, a right-pointing bracket, a caret, and a V. Under it you wrote, keep this one for Mr Pyle. I asked Pyle at the chandler's, and he laughed and said it was your private shorthand for the ridge above the sluice. Ground rising, rising to a point, then falling away to the water. You drew it that way, he said, so the rough men on the cut could not copy the survey from the boat.

I have taken to walking out to the sluice in the evenings with the book and the lantern, trying to read the land the way you read it. The ground does exactly what your little row says. It climbs past the old boundary stone, peaks where the gulls sit, and drops into the reeds where the water lies black and still. Pyle says the mark only means the ground is firm enough to stand on. I think you meant the other thing, that the lowest place is never the end of the land, and that a person can come up out of it if they keep their eyes on the peak.

So I stand on the ridge with my boots wet and the lantern unlit, and I am not coming down until I see a light on the far bank. Write to me when you can. I will know your hand by the shape of the letters.