Black linework tattoo of three parallel bands wrapping around a forearm, with a broken gap in the middle line, in a geometric blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three-line band tattoo on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is three thick black lines wrapping around the forearm like an armband, with the middle section broken by a short gap. The lines are solid and evenly weighted, with no shading or fill, and they sit on a plain pale background. The composition is simple and centred on the forearm, with the bands angled slightly across the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas,

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The bell rope at Saint Aldric's has finally frayed through, and Brother Oswin has spliced it with the red wool you left in the scriptorium. I told him you would be furious. He said you would have liked the knot better than the bell. Three turns of cord round the wrist of the rope, just as you showed me, and then a gap where the old tarred strand used to run through the loop. He calls the gap the stop, and he will not hear otherwise.

Mostly I want to tell you about the lamp. The abbot has moved the night office an hour earlier because the frost is getting into the choir stalls, so each morning I walk the cloister in the dark with the tin lantern and scratch a mark into the lintel beside the infirmary door. Three lines a day, one for each bell, and a break in the middle where the hour changes. You will remember the chalk tallies we kept on the orchard wall. This is the same habit, only colder and with a blunter nail.

The break always falls in the same place, and I have stopped pretending it is an accident. The day you left sits in that gap. I know the abbot would call it vanity to count a friend's leaving in scratches on stone, but the lintel has been doing that work for both of us since the autumn.

Last night I started a fourth line below the others and ran it straight through without a break. It looked wrong, like a wound that had been bandaged shut. I am leaving it that way until the thaw.

Your brother in the cold,

Anselm

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