Black fine ink tattoo of five yin yang style symbols stacked vertically down the inner forearm near the wrist, shrinking and changing from solid to hollow.

Stacked yin yang symbols on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of five yin yang style symbols runs down the inner forearm, starting at the wrist. Each symbol is smaller than the one above it, and the series moves from a full yin yang to a plain hollow circle and a solid dot at the bottom. The linework is clean and the fills are solid black on pale skin, set against a blue-grey background.

Forearm Yin yang Symbol Circle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo kept the last of the old Caslon sorts in a biscuit tin on the windowsill, where the afternoon light from Hanley Street fell across them. Nobody at the works had ever asked what they were for. The foreman called them the dumplings, and when a proof came back wrong he would pull one from the tin and press it into the margin of the chase, and the apprentice would laugh and wipe the ink off his thumbs.

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Ruth started the spring the Heidelberg went to scrap. She was nineteen, quick with her hands, and on her first morning she counted the sorts aloud while the kettle boiled. Five. A full round one, black as a hole in a road. A smaller one with its tail curled back. A tail on its own, like a comma that had lost its nerve. A hollow ring. A dot. "Who cut these?" she asked. "Nobody cut them," said Okonedo. "They wore down. Every time somebody needed a stop in a hurry, they took the nearest one, and the nearest one got smaller."

She learned the press that summer, and the chase, and how to read a galley backwards without thinking. By autumn the tin was lighter. The round sort had gone into a Christmas card, then a parish newsletter, then a sign for a chip shop that never paid its bill. Okonedo said nothing about it. He only tapped the tin twice with one finger when he passed it.

When the works closed in the new year, Ruth found the tin empty except for the dot, rubbed smooth on one side from a thousand thumbs. She carried it home in her coat pocket. Later she pressed it onto a plain card and mailed it to Okonedo with no words at all, and he wrote back on the back of a bill: "Good. Now you know where to stop."