Close-up of three small groups of tally marks in black fine-line ink on the inner forearm, with a dark patterned top visible behind the arm.

Tally marks on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is three separate groups of tally marks, each made of thin vertical strokes crossed by a diagonal stroke, with small dots between the groups. It is drawn in fine, even black linework with no shading. The arm fills the frame vertically against a plain pale background, with a dark patterned garment and a white door frame at the edges.

Fine line Forearm Tally marks Line Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the bucket steady, boy, and don't look at the water while I talk. Looking at it only makes a man's stomach remember things. Fourteen days we lay becalmed off the Azores, the Marigold of Whitby sat on that flat sea like a dropped glove. The cook weighed out the biscuit every morning on a brass scale, the captain's wife's clock stopped on the fourth day, and the rest of us counted the days the only way we could.

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Old Tobias Quayle kept the reckoning. He scratched it into the tar beneath the fife rail with the point of his knife: four upright strokes, then one slashed across them, the way his mother had taught him to count ewes on the fell. Between each group he set a small dot, so the eye had somewhere to rest. Nobody asked him why. I asked him once, and he said a man with a dot to rest on will sometimes not go over the side.

The wind came round on the twenty-third morning. It wasn't a gust at first, just a long breath out of the south-west, and then the canvas filled with a sound like somebody shaking out a bedsheet in a loft. Half the crew were at the halyards before they knew they'd moved. Tobias didn't cheer. He walked to the rail, drew the last stroke under the final dot, and sat down on a coil of rope with his hands in his lap.

The bosun scrubbed that tar off with sand before we raised Falmouth, and nobody said a word about it. But you'll find I still keep the count, boy, in fives, with a dot for resting. Now, the bucket.