Two matching tarot-style tattoos in black and grey dotwork on the inner forearms, each showing a figure inside a patterned border.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tarot card style forearm pair

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two tarot-style panels sit on the inner forearms, each framed by a rectangular border of dots and fine patterned lines. The left panel shows a long-haired female figure beneath a small Roman numeral, and the right shows a standing figure holding a long staff, with a numeral at the top. The work is done in black and grey with fine shading and dense stippling, and the hands are open and palm up at the bottom of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Woman Figure Crown Staff Border Pattern Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cards came out on the fish slab at five, before the boats were even loaded, Aunt Vera shuffling them the way other women fold washing. She dealt only two. The first was a long-haired woman with a small numeral above her head and a moon-pale robe that looked like it had been dragged through rope. The second was a figure with a staff and a crown of tiny rings. "Those two sail with you today," she said, knocking ice from the blade of my knife as if I had asked her to.

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Nine boats left Porthgwin into a sky the colour of wet slate. My brother Dafydd was aboard the Marigold, and I was on the hard mending the Silver Tern's nets, which is how I came to be in the shed when the wind backed round to the north-east and the harbour bell started ringing without anyone pulling it. I sat with a needle in one hand and the staff card in my pocket, counting the mesh knots until my fingers went numb.

The Marigold came in at dusk with her nets full and her deck empty of men. Dafydd had swapped his place with a boy from the chapel choir who had a cough and a mother at the gate. Nobody blamed him. The boy was still alive, and Dafydd was not, and Vera, when I went to tell her, only nodded at the card with the staff and said the figure had never been pointing at the sea. It pointed at the quay, at whoever was left to wait on it.

At first light I walked down to the steps where the boats tie up and pressed my palm flat on the wet stone, fingers open, the way the hands in the cards are held. The tide was turning. Somewhere out past the breakwater a single engine coughed, and I stayed where I was until it came round the light.