Close view of a small solid black triangle tattoo on the upper arm of a person in a grey henley top, with the face out of frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small solid triangle on an upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A person in a grey henley top raises one arm, showing a small, solid black triangle on the upper arm above the elbow. The face is out of frame, and the figure is framed by a black arched mirror edge against a plain white wall. The tattoo is a single filled shape in black ink with no shading or added detail.

Geometric Upper arm Triangle

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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

Sit down, sit, the kettle's still warm. You want the story of the three-cornered stone, or the one about the customs man? They're the same story if you listen long enough. Forty years back the frontier ran across the top of Harrow Fell, and nobody had bothered to say exactly where, only that a line had to be drawn. So two surveyors went up with a chain, a theodolite and a boy to carry the flags.

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The boy was Tomas Quill, and he was the only one who walked the whole length. At every hill that could see two valleys at once, they set a stone and cut a triangle into its face, point up, the way the old maps had it. Point up for the north, the senior man said, because the north was where the trouble came from. Tomas asked why a triangle and not a square. A square leans on its sides, the man said. A triangle only stands when all three hold.

When the chain snapped in the wet below the Scar, they lost a week. Tomas went down alone to the last stone and found the line bent by some glacier's old scrape. So he drew his own triangle a yard to the east, solid, filled in with lamp black so the weather would not take it. The office on the far side kept his line for thirty years, and nobody ever thought to check it.

So when the young guards at this crossing ask what that mark means, I tell them it is where the land finally agreed with itself. Then I ask them to stamp my papers, because the stone is still up there, and the line is still a yard east of where the maps say it should be.