Photo of a man's tattooed arms below the short sleeves of a white, grey and pink colour-block shirt, with mixed colour and black and grey designs on the upper arms and forearms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed arms beneath a colour-block shirt

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The photograph is cropped to the torso and arms, with the face out of frame. Both arms carry tattoos from below the shirt sleeves to the forearms, with the left arm showing a red heart-like shape among other colour and dark elements. The right arm is mainly black and grey with ornamental shapes, and the mix of colour and monochrome sits against a plain shirt in white, grey and pink.

Upper arm Forearm Heart Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't touch the cloth till the dye's set, our Dolly said, and I didn't, not that first morning, though my fingers itched. Forty bolts of oxford had come up from the dye house in three bands: white at the top, a grey like wet slate, and at the hem the pink, which the buyers swore would sell in Lisbon if it sold nowhere else.

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Ada Quarmby cut the patterns in the back room, where the light came in grey off the canal. She worked with a steel rule and a pencil stub behind her ear, and every spring she drew one shape nobody had asked for: a heart with a lace border, scrolled and dark as a bruise, to be pricked onto the card for the Jacquard loom. The overseer said it wasted ink. Ada said the loom didn't care what it wove, so long as the holes were in the right place.

The shirts went out in June. Nobody on the market stalls looked at the sleeves twice, which was how Ada wanted it. She had traced the lace down the cuffs of the grey band so it showed only when a man lifted his arm to reach for change or a tram ticket, and a thread of red had been stitched into the seam where the heart sat.

Dolly found the first one folded in a drawer years later and held it up to the window. The pink hem had faded to the colour of a sunburnt knuckle, but the heart was still there, pricked small and stubborn in the corner of the grey. She said nothing. She put it back and shut the drawer on it, the way you shut a door on a room you've decided to keep.