Back view of a woman on a pale beach with a small dark tattoo on her forearm and a tiny mark near her hip above the bikini bottoms.

Small tattoos on forearm and hip

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long, wavy blonde hair in a loose bun stands with her back to the camera on a pale, washed-out beach. A small dark tattoo sits on her left forearm near the wrist, and a tiny mark is visible on her buttock beneath the patterned bikini bottoms. The tattoos are very small and appear to be simple black linework, set against warm skin tones and a soft, hazy background.

Forearm Other Small tattoo Beach Bikini Long hair

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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

The tide has not come in past the breakwater for eleven years, so the gulls have given up on the sea and taken to following you up the shingle instead. You walk the line of old weed every morning with the tally slate under your arm, counting what the water left behind: a split sandal, a rope of fishing net, a glass float the colour of weak tea. Ondine at the salt works says the sea will come back when it is ready, and that you should stop checking its homework.

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The marks on your wrist are still tender at the edges from the spring after the last big surge. Three dots and a hooked stroke, the old notation for a tide turning. Mira pricked them in with a needle sterilised in a paraffin flame and charged you a jar of dried mackerel, which was robbery and you knew it at the time. She said a tide mark was a promise that you would come back to the same spot and find it had moved. You thought she was being poetic. She was being accurate.

This morning the weed was damp at the top of the wall, which it has not been for years. You stood still and watched a thin grey line creep across the sand, no wider than a thread, and you did not run to tell anyone. You counted the seconds between each ripple instead, the way Mira taught you, and wrote the number on the slate in small careful strokes.

When you finally walked back, the gulls had already gone quiet. Ondine was at the gate with her arms folded, not asking. You held up the slate. She read the figure, then looked past you at the water, and for once she did not tell you to stop checking.