Black and white three-panel photo of a blackwork band tattoo of varying black lines wrapping around the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striped wrist band tattoo

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows three black and white photographs of the same wrist from different angles. The tattoo is a band of bold black lines of varying thickness and length that encircles the wrist, with some lines broken into short dashes. The shading is solid black ink with no greys, set against a plain white textured background.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Stripe Band Line Wrist

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tally man came down the lane at six with his ledger under one arm and a stub of carpenter's pencil behind his ear, and every woman in Coedylan knew before he reached the gate what the number on her husband's wagon would be. My mother could read a tub the way other women read the weather. Long lines meant full, short broken dashes meant the stone that slipped in with the coal.

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Dafydd Pugh was checkweighman at the Nant pit and he had a way of ruling the sheet that nobody else bothered with. He drew every load as a band across the page, one stroke per tub, thick where the seam ran clean and split into dashes where the shale came up. He showed me once, sitting on the step of the lamp room with the pencil between his teeth, and said a stranger could read a whole shift from it as easily as a name.

The winter the Nant closed he stopped coming down the lane. The ledger stayed in the lamp room with the last week still blank. My mother took the pencil from its hook and ruled the band herself, tub by tub, the way she had watched him do it. She got the count wrong twice. On the third try she left the dashes where they fell and drew the long lines straight through them.

When the owners' man came up from Cardiff with his clipboard, he held my mother's sheet to the window and frowned at it for a long minute. Then he asked who had made it. I told him it was the tally, that every load had been counted, and that the stone was there too, because the stone was part of the work. He handed it back without a word, which in our village was the nearest thing to a receipt anyone ever got.