Small black fine line tattoo of a swirled symbol with curled ends on the inner wrist, viewed with the palm facing up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small swirled symbol on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single symbol sits on the inner wrist, formed of a vertical stroke crossed by a shorter horizontal stroke, with curled ends at the top and bottom. The linework is thin, even and solid black, with no shading. The plain pale skin and marble surface behind the wrist keep the focus on the small design.

Fine line Forearm Symbol Swirl Cross Abstract

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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 closer, children, and mind the candle, for the wax is spitting like a cat. You want to know why Brother Anselm drew his little crooked cross at the foot of every page he copied. Forty winters he did it in the scriptorium at Saint Ebba's on the fen edge, and the abbot scolded him each Lent for wasting good ink on it.

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One February the abbot found the psalter Anselm had finished for the Bishop of Ely. Every page closed with the mark, and the abbot grew red and reached for the birch switch. But Anselm only pointed at the window, where the floodwater had come in overnight and drowned the lower meadow. 'That upright is the stroke that holds the ground,' he said, 'and that bar is the reach of the dyke. The curls are where the water turns back. Leave out any part and nothing stands.'

The abbot, being a practical man, took a spade down to the drowned meadow and found the old ditch lines beneath the silt, straight as a ruler and crossed by the dyke where the brothers of a hundred years past had cut them. At every crossing the spade had left a little curl where the cut turned back on itself. He came up muddy to the knee and said nothing about ink for a month.

Anselm died in the spring with his quill still wet. They say the last page of the psalter was left unfinished, the top curl open like a hand reaching for the next line. The book is in a glass case in Cambridge now, and if you ask the librarian nicely, she will turn to that page and let you look at it for as long as the candle lasts.