Black fine-line tally marks, four upright strokes crossed by a fifth, tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Tally marks on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo of tally marks, made of four upright strokes crossed by a fifth diagonal stroke. The lines are thin, even and crisp, with no shading, sitting on pale skin near the wrist. The plain black-on-skin composition is centred, with a dark leather surface blurred in the background.

Fine line Forearm Tally marks Line

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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

Sit down, you lot, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the good oil. You want the story of the Hesketh Gates, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, which is to say slowly and with the wrong names in places.

Keep reading

Four hundred years back, when the ring at Hesketh Station still turned, a cartographer called Ilse Varga kept the count for the water rota. Every ninth day she scratched a gate into the condensation on the galley window: four upright strokes, then one slash laid across them like a bar. Five days of rain, five days of drought, and the slash marked the day the cistern was opened. She never let a mark run past its bar. People called her superstitious. She said she was only tired of arguing with arithmetic.

Then the pumps failed in the winter cycle, and the rota became something men shouted about in corridors. Ilse did not shout. She went on drawing her gates in the frost, and the crew learned that when they doubted a number they could walk down to the window and count the gates themselves. Nobody could dispute a gate.

When the relief ship finally docked, the captain asked how she had kept the water fair through the dark months. Ilse wiped the glass with her sleeve, drew one more gate, and let the frost close over it. The window is still there, my dears, though the frost has long since gone, and if you press your palm to the pane in the right light, you can feel where the bars were.