Black ink sleeves of text fragments, grid lines and scribbled marks covering both forearms and upper arms.

Text and grid sleeves on both arms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person holds both arms bent up in front of them, showing full sleeve tattoos from the wrists to the upper arms. The designs combine fragments of printed-style text, overlapping grid lines, and dense scribbled and dotted marks. The work is in black ink only, shown against a pale wall with a grey top and a lamp in the background.

Forearm Upper arm Text Grid Line Sleeve Pattern Abstract

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The forme was locked up by ten, but Nell kept the gas low and picked the last of the sorts from the case by feel. Someone had left a galley of agate type spoiled at the foot of the page, a column of words chopped mid-line like a map torn along a fold. The foreman wanted it clean for the Monday run, so she worked the composing stick with her left hand and kept her right on the rule, counting quads under her breath.

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By midnight the page was a grid of brass rules and stray lines of verse, and she could see what the compositor before her had been doing. He had set the same stanza again and again, each time one letter further along, so the words crept down the page like water finding the lowest course. Nell knew that trick. Her husband Tom had done it on the back of tide tables when they were courting, drawing harbour walls in pencil and filling the gaps with scraps of the paper he read on the ferry.

She inked the proof with a rag and pulled it through the Albion press. The sheet came up grey and dense, the grid breaking into shadows where the lines crossed, and across the middle someone had scribbled a single row of dots that ran from margin to margin. It was Tom's line, the one he drew each spring to show where the river met the sea at the Humber mouth. Somebody had kept it in the type for thirty years.

She broke the forme down, returned the sorts to their boxes and pinned the proof to the frame. Then she set the date at the top in a neat hand, and beneath it, in the smallest pica she could find, the words that had been missing all along: come home by the tide.