Fine line black outline tattoo of a wishbone on the upper arm near the elbow, with a raised arm and grey sleeve.

Small wishbone tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small wishbone is drawn in a single thin black outline on the upper arm, close to the elbow. The linework is clean and even, with no shading or fill. The arm is raised against a soft, blurred pale background, with a grey sleeve in the lower part of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Hold it by the long end, Nell, and don't you dare let go till I've counted to three." Her brother's thumb was already slipping, and the pale fork of bone spun in the lamplight above the Sunday plates at Gorse Lane. Outside, the tide was working at the harbour wall with the same stubborn patience it had shown since the mill closed.

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Nell had the short half. She always did. Tom said it was because she had cheated at marbles, and she said it was because the bone liked her better, and the argument had run so long that neither could remember which of them had started it. Their mother watched from the stove, wiping her hands on a tea towel printed with ships.

"One," said Tom. "Two."

The bone cracked clean. Nell's piece was a sliver longer, and Tom groaned the way boys do when fortune has treated them unfairly on a technicality. He wanted, he announced, to be a lighthouse keeper. Nell wanted nothing said aloud, because her grandmother had always insisted that a wish spoken in the kitchen went straight out the window and got eaten by the gulls.

She closed her eyes and made the wish anyway, small and private, and slid the bone into the biscuit tin on the dresser with the other lucky things: a sixpence, a blue glass fishing float, a button from a coat nobody remembered. Years later, when the house on Gorse Lane was sold and the tin came down from the dresser, the wishbone was still there, bleached nearly white, and Nell found she could still tell which way it had pointed.