Small black fine line tattoo of angular chevron-like marks on the inner wrist of a hand resting beside a mug with a painted woodland scene.

Thin angular symbol on an inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of three angular, chevron-like strokes sits on the inner wrist and forearm of a hand holding a white mug. The linework is thin and uniform with no shading, and the tattoo is the only element in black ink on the skin. The mug has a painted woodland scene in soft greens and yellows with a path and handwritten script below, and it fills the left side of the composition against a wooden table.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marks cut into the beech at the top of the lane are the only directions anyone on Hollin Isle trusts, and you learn to read them before you learn your letters. Three angled strokes, each one a small roof pitched against the wind, cut deep enough that the sap bleeds down in June. Your grandmother pressed her thumb into the grain on your first morning. Follow these and the path goes where it always goes. Ignore them and the wood keeps you.

Keep reading

The wood has no ferry of its own. In October the path sinks under bracken and the tide creeps up through the ditches, and the men from the mainland who came to survey it for the water board sent back a map with the trees left blank. You were sent after them with a flask of tea and a ledger, because you were the only one who could walk the path without looking down. At the third chevron the birds went quiet. At the fourth, a gate you had never seen stood open on a meadow that was not there at dawn.

You found the surveyors sitting on a stile, their boots full of water, their notebook open at a page of arrows pointing in every direction at once. One of them had written beneath them, in a careful hand, that the trees kept moving when nobody was watching. You did not write that down. You turned your ledger round, drew three small marks in the margin, and handed him the pencil.

Walking home, you kept your eyes on the beeches and not the mud, and the path came back to the lane as if it had never strayed. The water board sent a single line: wood surveyed, no change. When you told your grandmother, she only nodded and said the marks were for leaving, not for arriving, and that you would have to cut the next one yourself.

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