Black and grey geometric tattoo on a forearm with stacked triangles, a fingerprint-textured triangle and downward chevrons, the lowest chevron dotted.

Stacked triangles and chevrons on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black downward-pointing triangle above a larger downward triangle filled with a fingerprint pattern. Below them sit a small outlined triangle, a bold chevron and a fine chevron finished with dotwork near the wrist. The design uses black ink only, photographed against a dark stone wall with leaves at the right edge.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Triangle Fingerprint Chevron Arrow Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass gauge on Lock Nine read four feet of fall that morning, and Mr Tallis wanted it written in the book before the bargemen came back for their wages. I told him the water had never once asked for my opinion, so I would write what it said and leave the rest to him. He thought me soft. Thirty years on the Ribble cut had taught him to read a sluice by its sound, not by a ledger, and he said so with his pipe clamped in his teeth.

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Every gate I dropped, I sealed with wax from the tin on the windowsill, and every seal I pressed with my right thumb while it was still soft. Mother said the thumb was the only honest thing a lock-keeper owned. The paddles went down in steps, each oak triangle sinking under the one above, and the chevrons we cut into the coping stones showed how high the river had stood in the years before us. The lowest was so fine you needed a lamp to find it, and the old men called it the dry year, though nobody living had seen the bed of the river that low.

Tallis drowned in the February flood, the week the new gates came up from Preston. They took him out below the weir with his pipe still in his coat. Afterwards I went down with a candle and a pot of the fine ink the surveyors used, and I cut a small chevron beneath the dry year, then dotted it, one dot for each day the water had stood still at the sill. On the fourth day I pressed my thumb to the wet ink, the way I pressed the seals, and it came up as clear as any mark on the gate, and the river kept on running past it all the same.