Black and white photo of a forearm with three thin parallel fine line tattoos wrapping around it, with damp hair falling across the background.

Three fine lines around a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a bare forearm bent at the elbow, with three thin, evenly spaced black lines wrapping around the arm just above the wrist. The lines are crisp and solid with no shading, and they run in gentle curves that follow the shape of the arm. The monochrome image has soft grey tones, a blurred background and loose strands of wet-looking hair in the upper right.

Fine line Forearm Line Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your uncle hands you the top hook before you have learned to stand straight on the ropewalk, and the first thing he tells you is that a rope is only three honest strands who have agreed to lean on each other. You hold the yarn taut at the hook while he walks backwards down the long shed, feeding the strands out, and the wind comes through the open doors smelling of tar and fish heads.

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Every Saturday the tar pot boils over and you scrub it with sand until your knuckles crack. Nobody in Porthleven talks about the winter the Grace went onto the Mount, only that her mate's rope parted and that Dad said it had been laid by someone in a hurry. Your uncle does not hurry. He lays each strand with a twist you can feel in your own wrist when he guides it, the three of them tightening and biting until the whole length hums like a plucked wire.

When the lay is finished he winds a length of spare twine around your forearm three times, just above the wrist, and pulls each turn snug with his teeth. "So you remember which way you were turning," he says, and the twine leaves three pale bands on your skin that last until the tide goes out and comes back again.