Fine line black tattoo of three runic symbols, including a small stick-like figure, on the inner forearm.

Three runic symbols on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a fine line tattoo on the inner forearm, showing three black symbols in a row: two angular rune-like marks flanking a small stick-like figure with a raised arm. The lines are thin, even and solid black with no shading, set on a pale skin tone against a patterned black and white top. The composition is a straight-on crop focused on the tattoo, with a faint pencil guideline visible above and below it.

Fine line Forearm Rune Figure Symbol Stick figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stick came out of the peat smoke on the Thursday before the wedding, wrapped in a bit of sailcloth and tied with wet twine. My uncle Tam had carved it at the kitchen table with his knife, and he would not explain the three marks to anyone. The first looked like a cattle hook, he said. The last was a rider's shape, a thing that leaned into weather. The little man in the middle had one arm up, the way a man does when he is hailing a boat from the far side of a voe.

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Callum, the groom, lived across the sound at Birsay, and the crossing was rough that month. Nobody had told him the ferry was off, so when the bell rang at the slipway that Saturday morning, it was me in my father's oilskins, rowing out with the stick under my coat. The sea had the colour of pewter and the gulls had gone quiet. I kept my eyes on the far shore and tried to remember whether Tam had meant the wedding would go ahead, or that someone must be fetched.

Callum was waiting on the shingle with his best jacket already soaked. I handed him the stick without a word. He turned it over, found the carved figure, and laughed until he coughed. 'He's telling me to wave,' he said, 'and to stop standing there like a fence post.' So he raised his arm just as the little man did, and the wind came round to the south and the sea went flat as a plate.

The wedding was at two, in the hall with the broken window. Tam gave the speech, which was four sentences long, and ended by saying the stick was to stay on the mantel for the next time one of us went out in weather. I still have it. The three marks have gone grey with handling, and whenever I look at that raised arm I think of Callum standing on the stones, hailing the one person who had come to bring him home.