Close photo of a fine line tally mark tattoo in black ink on the pale inner forearm, with four upright strokes crossed by a fifth and two further strokes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tally marks on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pale forearm shows a small tattoo of tally marks made from thin, dark lines. Four upright strokes are crossed by a diagonal stroke, with two more separate strokes to the upper right. The ink is a clean, even dark tone against the skin, and the photo is taken at an angle inside a vehicle, with the background softly out of focus.

Fine line Forearm Tally marks Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the frost came back to the valley of Hollin Bottom after the cherries had already set their fruit, and every spring the old gardener at Marrow Cottage went out before light with a stick of charred willow and a pot of walnut oil. She did not count the frosts. She counted the nights she had kept the beans alive, which was a different number and a harder one to be honest about.

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Her neighbour, a carter called Tobias Quill, thought this foolish. He said a frost was a frost and a bean was a bean, and a woman who kept a tally of her own cleverness would end up with nothing but a wall full of scratches. He came up the lane one April with a sack of seed potatoes and found her on her knees by the garden wall, marking four upright strokes and crossing them with a fifth.

"That's a week," he said.

"That's a week," she agreed. "The seventh night I sat up with the lamp, and the thrush sat up with me on the gatepost. The other two I'll mark when they come."

Tobias scratched his jaw. He had forgotten how she had carried water from the well through the whole of the dry summer, and how she had given his lame ox a bran mash without asking for money. He did not say so. He set down the sack, took the willow stick from her hand, and made the two strokes himself, leaning close, the way a man does who has never been asked to keep anything.

They planted the potatoes that afternoon. When the next frost came, he came up the lane again and did not say a word about foolishness. He simply knelt and made a mark of his own beside hers, and the wall was counted from then on by two hands.