A tattooist in gloves works on a small design on a person's forearm with a tattoo machine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooist inking a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattooist wearing latex gloves uses a tattoo machine to work on a small design on the inside of a person's forearm. The ink appears dark, and the linework is fine and small. The arm rests on a white cloth in a studio setting, with the tattooist's hands and the machine at the centre of the frame.

Forearm Tattoo machine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo's hand never shook, not once in thirty-one years, and Tomasz had stopped trying to work out how. He stood by the sink at the back of the shop in Margate with a roll of blue paper towel, watching her hold the machine the way his grandfather held a fountain pen, loose at the wrist and certain at the tip. The ink was so dark it looked like the sea had come in under the skin.

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"Stop counting," she said without looking up. "You count, you breathe wrong, and then the line goes wobbly." He had not known he was counting. He had been mouthing the strokes of the little moth she was drawing, eleven of them, each no wider than a fingernail. She dipped the needle, wiped it on the paper, and went on as if the room had not moved at all.

At the end of the afternoon she let him change the white cloth under the arm, which was the only job she ever gave him that mattered. He rolled the old sheet into a ball and saw, in the bright fold of it, a single fine smear of black where the needle had grazed the edge. He kept looking at it longer than he meant to.

"That one's mine," she said, pulling off her gloves. "Everything else on that cloth is someone else's business." Tomasz pressed the paper towel flat over the mark and watched it bloom grey, then lift away clean, and found he was smiling at a thing nobody would ever see.