Black and white photo of a woman seen from behind in a white t-shirt with printed script, showing small tattoos of symbols on her upper arms and forearms.

Small symbol tattoos on arms

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman seen from behind, her hair loose and her hands clasped behind her back. Several small tattoos of simple symbols sit on her upper arms and forearms, drawn in thin dark linework. The composition is centred on the back of a white t-shirt printed with handwritten script against a plain grey wall.

Upper arm Forearm Script text T-shirt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby learned her letters from the back of a seed catalogue and her map-reading from her uncle, who drew the fen roads on the backs of envelopes so the lorry drivers would stop getting lost. He gave her the signs too: a tiny star for a well, a cross for a crossing where the drains met, an arrow that meant the road floods in March. She copied them onto her wrists with his pen the summer she turned eleven, and by the time the dance hall let out she could find her way home in the pitch dark without a lamp.

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The trouble with the signs was that they only worked if you trusted them. In October, when the dance hall emptied early because the band's van wouldn't start, Nell walked the causeway with the wind pushing at her back. Her lamp went out in the first gust. Her marks were smudged with rain, but she remembered the arrow. The road floods in March, her uncle had said, but it floods in October too when the sluice is open, and everybody forgets.

She went the long way, past the mill where the star sat over the pump, counting the crosses like beads. Halfway along the dyke the water was already over her boots. She stood still and waited for the moon to come out from behind the clouds, which it did, and she saw the drowned hedge where the road should have been. Then she turned onto the carrier path her uncle had shown her, the one nobody used because it had no sign at all.

He was waiting at the gate when she came in, soaked to the knee, his lamp burning in the window. He did not ask why she was late. He took her wrist, turned it to the light and tapped the last mark, a small circle she had never seen him draw. 'That one's for coming back,' he said, and went to put the kettle on.