Fine line black ink tattoo of three angular, letter-like marks on the side of the ribs, partly covered by a grey t-shirt.

Three angular letter-like marks on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three angular, letter-like marks sits on the side of the torso, just below the hem of a light grey t-shirt. The thin, uniform black linework forms sharp right-angled and chevron shapes with no shading. The ink is set against warm skin in a close, slightly angled shot with a hand visible at the lower edge.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Chevron Linework

Find an artist for this

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

Brother Anselm has already scraped the wax tablet clean by the time you reach the desk, which means you are late again, and the copying must begin without breakfast. He lays a sheet of vellum under your hand and taps three marks at its foot: a square hook, a chevron pointing east, a tall V with one arm cut short. Copy them until the strokes stop wobbling, he says. They are older than the abbey, and nobody here reads them any more.

Keep reading

The marks were cut into the lid of a reliquary that the bishop's men carried up the valley in the sleet. You copy them forty times, then sixty. Your nib snags on the grain and throws a blot, and Anselm scrapes it away without looking up. By the third bell the lamp oil is low and the marks no longer look like letters at all. They look like the slope of a roof under snow, a river bending round a stone, a man lifting his arm against the glare.

On the last sheet, the one you were not told to finish, you see that the marks are not a word but a route. Each chevron turns the way the valley road turns. The square hook is the mill, and the short arm of the V is the ford where the carts went through the ice last March. Anselm's name is written there too, in the old manner, at the end of the line, where the road stops.

You do not show him. You blot the sheet and carry it to the fire, and watch the edge curl brown before the ink gives up its direction. Then you take a clean leaf and begin again, very carefully, the way the road would go if someone were walking it home.