Black linework geometric tattoo of interlocking squares in a branching lattice on the inner forearm, with a yellow object and coloured bands at the wrist.

Square lattice tattoo on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is shown with a tattoo of connected black square outlines arranged in a stepped, branching lattice that spreads across the arm. The lines are thin and even, with no shading, and the open squares give a pixel-like or circuit-like effect. The image is in colour, but the tattoo is in black ink on pale skin against a glossy red surface, with the wrist partly showing a yellow object and teal bands.

Geometric Fine line Forearm Square Lattice Grid Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the Veldmoor for three days when Ottilie Fenn finally got her chain across the bog. Her master had sent her with the old brass theodolite, a boy to carry the poles, and a letter for the Reeve of Carrow Fen that said only: measure the lattice, do not fill it. She had no idea what a lattice meant in a bog. Then the mist lifted and she saw it, laid out on the peat like a sum someone had started and abandoned, stepping up the slope in squares no wider than a hand.

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Each square was the outline of a plot, the boy said, cut into the turf with a hot iron by the Crown's first surveyors. Nobody had walked the squares since the flood of the old king's grandmother's time, when Carrow and two other villages went under the mere in a single night. The reeve's family still paid rent on the squares, and the water took the rent anyway. Ottilie knelt, sighted along the first line, and counted. Forty-one squares wide. Every one open at the centre.

By dusk she had the measurements in her ledger and a sketch that would not come out right. Each time she drew the lines solid, the page looked like a wall. Only when she left the middles bare did the thing make sense, a web of paths that could be walked from any corner back to the start. The boy asked whether she meant to fill them in for the Crown. She said the Crown had sent for a map, not a fence.

At dawn she shut the ledger and set brass pins in the four corners, leaving the centre of each square as the surveyors had. The mist came back over the mere. Somewhere under it, she thought, the villages were still laid out in their squares, and the water had been asked politely to keep to the lines.