A gloved hand holds a fine needle above a small fresh black mark on a forearm, with no defined style visible.

Tattooist working on a small mark on an arm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A gloved hand holds a thin steel needle and a metal instrument close to a small, fresh black mark on a bare arm. The skin is in soft focus against a dark background, and the mark is the only ink visible. The image is shot at a shallow angle with cool, low lighting.

Forearm Needle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ring had been empty since the Tuesday matinee, and Marisol still couldn't bring herself to sweep the sawdust. Hollis had left her the big tent, the leaking water tank and a debt of four thousand pounds to a man in Rochdale who called himself a promoter. What he hadn't left was an act. The last acrobat had gone to a council job in Leeds, the lion had died in a field outside Wigan, and the clowns had split their takings and their friendships in the same week.

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She found the needle in the props trunk, wrapped in a chamois with a bent steel probe beside it. Hollis had used it on the tent seams and once, drunkenly, on his own knuckle. Marisol turned it over under the work lamp and thought of the tattooist in Bolton who had inked the ringmaster's crest on her wrist years ago, the one who said a good line was like a good tightrope walk: you did it slowly, and you never looked down. She had no ink. She had a fountain pen and a bottle of black Quink, and a thing she needed to say to someone who was not going to be in the audience.

She dipped the needle, pressed the small dark mark into the soft skin of her own forearm, and counted to nine. It took three tries before the line came out straight. When she finished she held the arm up to the lamp. A single black stroke, no bigger than a grain of rice, the first thing she had made in a month that didn't need a buyer.

By morning the mark had blurred at the edges. She rolled down her sleeve, took the Rochdale letter from the table, and went out to find the man who owed her a ticket.