Close photo of a small black outline triangle tattoo on the side of a finger, in a geometric style, with blue painted nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small outline triangle on a finger

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with blue painted nails is held towards the camera, and a small black outlined triangle sits on the side of one finger. The linework is thin and even, with the triangle left unshaded and filled with skin tone. The image has a heavy warm, saturated colour filter with a white border and small registration marks around the edge.

Geometric Hand Triangle Outline Nail polish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Rae had been told the triangles on the walls meant the ground beneath was sound, and she believed it until the Wednesday the brass plate on the chapel step cracked clean through. Her father sent her up the hill with a tin of blue enamel and a hog-hair brush, because the surveyor's marks on the sheds were fading and the manager wanted them fresh before the inspectors came over from Wakefield.

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She worked from the bottom shed upwards, dabbing each outline the way her mother had taught her to paint the rim of a tea tray, slow and careful. The blue went on thick and bright against the soot. At the fourth shed a man she knew only by sight, Teddy Usher, leaned in the doorway with his lamp unlit and watched her.

'Those are the ones that mean it's safe,' he said. 'Walk on a triangle and you're walking on coal that's been measured. Walk anywhere else and you're trusting your luck.' He tapped the wall where she had just finished. 'Last spring they marked Lewis's cellar and the roof came in regardless.' She did not know what to say, so she painted the next one, and the one after, until the light went orange over the spoil heaps and he had gone home.

When she came back down the hill her fingers were stained blue to the knuckle, and she held them out to her father like evidence. He looked at them a long time. 'Then we go by the marks and nothing else,' he said. Later, in bed, she took a biro from the drawer and drew a small black triangle on the side of one finger, pressing hard so it would last, because if the walls could be trusted to keep a family alive, she supposed a girl could carry her own.