Fine line black tattoo of three thin parallel bands wrapping around a woman's forearm, photographed against a grey-blue background.

Three thin bands around a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three thin, evenly spaced black lines encircle the forearm, running at a slight angle across the arm. The linework is crisp and uniform, with no shading, and the ink is a dark grey-black against the skin. The arm is shown in profile against a soft blue-grey backdrop, with the subject's hair falling across the shoulder and out of frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Ellen had the candle-cutting that winter, which meant she sat in the lamp house at Lowmoor Drift with a penknife and a crate of tallow stubs, scoring three rings into each one. Three rings made an hour and a half of light if the draught was kind, she said, and the men could read the time off the wax without a watch. Dad called it a fool's clock. Mam said it was the only clock in Scarth Hollow that never lied to anybody.

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I was fourteen and mostly in her way, but she let me hold the knife the week the roof came down in the number two heading. She showed me how to press just hard enough that the wax parted clean rather than crumbling. "Lines want to be even," she said. "Or the men don't trust them."

On the third night the cage stuck at the four-hundred-foot mark and we stood at the pit top for eleven hours with our hands in our pockets. Ellen lit a fresh candle each time the rings burned down and sent a boy running with it to the shaft gate, so the families at the rail could see the time going and know nobody had stopped counting. By dawn the stubs stood in a row along the sill like little wax drums.

When the cage finally came up, Ellen didn't look at the men first. She looked at the last candle, still burning, its three bands as sharp as the day she cut them. "You don't measure the dark," she said, pinching the wick out. "You just keep cutting the next line."

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