Black blackwork tattoo of stacked triangles and a vertical line running down the inner forearm of a person standing on a wooden floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked triangles on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a forearm, held out towards the camera, with a vertical line of stacked solid black triangles tattooed along it. The triangles decrease in size towards the wrist, with some outlined and some filled, and the linework is crisp against the skin. The person wears a shirt, jeans and trainers, and the plain background and wooden floor keep the focus on the tattoo.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Triangle Line Arrow Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, you, and mind the draught from that door. Right, the arrows. You've all seen them on the back of the Lamb's cellar door and on the lintel at Mrs Pirie's, the stacked black triangles that point down the hill. My grandfather painted the first of them in nineteen twelve, the year the gaslights on Cowgate came down and the council sent the dark in with them.

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He was a sign-writer with a steady hand and a bad chest, and he had a blind fiddler for a neighbour called Tam Oddie who played the same reel every night outside the Crown and could never find his own step home. Gran said Grandad would not take a penny for it. He only asked for the cellar grating to be left open so the tune would carry down the closes. Each triangle he painted smaller than the last, so Tam could feel the drop through his boots, the way a man feels the ground fall away on a stair he has walked a thousand times.

The last one was a single solid point at the foot of the wall, no bigger than a thumbnail. Tam's boots found it every night for eleven years, and when he died they did not stop. Grandad said the arrow only pointed the way, and the rest was the fiddle's business. I used to think that was just a clever thing to say. Now I'm not so sure, because I have never once walked past that wall without my feet slowing at the bottom point, as if someone were still tapping his stick on the stones ahead of me.