Three stacked quilt block tattoos in colour on the inner forearm, in a clean geometric style with black outlines.

Three quilt block tattoos on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Three square quilt block designs are stacked vertically on the inner forearm. The top block shows a green eight-point star around a red centre, the middle block a red and orange spiral within a teal square, and the bottom block yellow and teal chevrons across a grid. Thin black outlines define each shape, and the flat colour fills sit neatly within the grid lines against a light skin tone.

Geometric Forearm Star Spiral Chevron Grid Square

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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 kitchen table is too small for the quilt, so you lay the squares out on the floor of the back room while the kettle goes cold behind you. Nine boats went out past the Carr at four this morning and you have counted them twice, the way your mother taught you to count stitches, under your breath. Your fingers know the pattern before your head does: a star first, eight points cut from green cloth your aunt dyed in a copper pot, a red square at its centre like a lamp left burning in a window.

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The second block is the hard one. Mrs Gall at the harbour office calls it the Log Cabin, though nobody in Skerrow has ever lived in a log cabin and nobody wants to. You turn the strips inward from the outer edge, red and orange, round and round to a small hot heart, and you tell yourself the spiral is only a way of stitching a hearth. Each strip is a day someone came home late. You do not count the strips. You count the boats again.

By the third block the light has gone grey over the pier and you are sewing by the window. Yellow and teal chevrons rise and fall across the grid, the same shape the swell makes when the wind backs east. You pin the last corner at ten past nine. Down at the slipway a horn sounds once, low and certain, and you push the needle through the cloth and leave it there, the thread still trailing, so you will know exactly where you stopped when you go to the door.