Black and grey photograph of a forearm with a blackwork tattoo of two bands at the wrist and three bold stripes further up the arm.

Striped bands on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is raised against a pale wall, with the hand bent at the wrist. Two thin black bands wrap the wrist, and a wider set of three black stripes sits higher on the forearm, separated by white gaps. The solid black lines are crisp and uniform, and the soft vignette lighting keeps the focus on the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down before the urn boils over, because I am going to tell you about the cricket jumper that nearly finished Gordon Fenwick, and I'm the only one left alive who saw it.

Keep reading

Nineteen sixty-one, the summer the groundsman's shed burned down. We had one set of whites between eleven boys, and Headmaster Pryce insisted on the three bands at the cuff, black, white, black, the old colours from before the war. Fenwick wore his sleeves rolled to the elbow like a bank clerk. Every time he bowled, the bands rode up past his wrist and the white gaps went grey with sweat and Cresswell grass.

We played Cresswell Grammar that Saturday. In the last over they needed four runs. Fenwick took the ball, rolled his sleeves down, and buttoned them tight, the two thin bands closing like handcuffs. He bowled the ball of his life, and the batsman's middle stump went cartwheeling into the hedge.

Here's the bit you won't believe. The jumpers went back to the school the next term, every one except Fenwick's. He kept his folded in a drawer until the day he died, and when his widow handed me the cuffs at the funeral, the white gaps were still the brightest thing in the room. None of you remember him from the register, I know, but you remember those stripes. That's the trouble with a bit of pattern. It outlasts the lad who wore it.

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