Small black fine line tattoo of three overlapping outlined triangles on the inner wrist, in a Geometric style.

Three overlapping triangles on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three outlined triangles of decreasing size, stacked and overlapping to form a single shape, sits on the inside of a wrist. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The photograph is taken at close range against a blurred background of festive lights, with a light grey sleeve at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Triangle Geometric shape

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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 third bearing never agreed with the first two, and Mr Ansell said so every morning at ten, tapping the drawing board with his pencil as if the paper had argued back. He had three stations on the Humber shore: the church tower at Easington, the windmill above Kilnsea, and the iron buoy off Spurn that the fishermen called the Dumpling. Draw a line from each to the sandbank, and the lines should meet at a point. They never did. They made a small, stubborn triangle instead, and that triangle sat exactly where the cutters kept running aground.

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So he drew it again, smaller. The first triangle he inked from the tower and the mill, bold and sure of itself. The second he drew inside it, using the buoy's bearing, and the third he nested inside that, checking each line against the tide tables Wilf fetched from the harbour office in a wet satchel. Wilf was fourteen and could row a skiff through the Spurn cut without looking at the water, but he could not abide a wobbly line, and he held the lamp steady while Mr Ansell worked.

Old Haskell came in with his cap in his fist and asked why the sandbank had shrunk to a speck on the paper. Mr Ansell did not answer him. He only pointed at the three triangles, one inside the next, and said the error was honest and the shape was true.

The chart hung in the office for thirty years. The inner triangle, drawn in thin black ink, went pale under thumbs. By the end the men who used it were touching the smallest shape first, the way you touch a doorframe you have walked through a thousand times.