Overhead photo of three small black cross tattoos on a forearm, next to a wide silver cuff bracelet and a hand resting on a grey concrete slab.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three small crosses on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three small black cross shapes sit on the forearm near the wrist, with simple solid linework and no visible shading. The person wears a black jumper, blue jeans and black strappy sandals, and a wide silver cuff with a ring detail. The image is shot from above on pale concrete with a grey slab in the lower left, leaving the tattoos as a small, clear focal point.

Forearm Cross Hand Ring Sandal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart had been wet for three days before Maud thought to dry it. Salt had crept into the creases of the Admiralty sheet and the soundings had bled into small blue bruises, but the three crosses she had made in pencil along the Hebrides run were still sharp enough to read. She laid the sheet flat on the chart table, weighted its corners with a sextant box, a tin of tobacco and the brass dividers, and bent close under the lamp.

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Nobody aboard the Kittiwake knew what the crosses meant. Captain Harrow assumed they were fixes for the sounding lead. The mate thought they were the sort of mark sailors scratch on a hull before a crossing. Maud had made them in the dead hours of the middle watch, each time the keel drifted over a patch where the bottom rose without warning, a shelf of rock the charts swore wasn't there. Three of them, spaced like posts along a fence. She had never told anyone that the third was the morning the galley boy went over the side, reaching for a line that fell just short of his hand.

On the fourth morning the fog lifted and there was the coast, low and grey, exactly where the sheet said it would be. Maud took up the pencil and wrote the time and bearing beside the crosses. Then, because the ship had come through and the water was calm enough to hear the gulls, she drew a small circle around the last cross and rolled the chart tight under her arm before going up on deck to find the lead line.