Fine line tattoo of three parallel black bands wrapping around a woman's forearm, with long brown hair blowing across a teal background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three thin bands on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long brown hair, shown from behind, bends her arm towards the lower right of the frame. Three thin, parallel dark lines wrap fully around the forearm, evenly spaced and running at a slight angle. The ink is a dark blue-black against soft, cool teal tones, and the plain background keeps the focus on the band.

Fine line Forearm Line Band Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third waltz you have given up on the tickets and are counting the brass strips instead. Three of them run the length of the sprung floor at the Marine Ballroom on Hollins Pier, pale where the feet wear them, and every Saturday Mr Pellow polishes them with a rag soaked in vinegar so the dancers can find the line without looking down.

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Tonight the band has come in from Weston with a clarinettist who refuses to play anything after eleven, and the floor is full of sailors with their caps folded into their back pockets. You stand by the cloakroom with a tray of lemonade and watch a girl from the cannery lead her brother across the strips, one step, two, turn, as though the lines are a rope she has been told to keep hold of.

At half past eleven the lights dip and the wind comes off the sea hard enough to rattle the big windows. Pellow comes to find you with his hat in his hands and says the tide has taken the lower boards of the pier, the band is packing up, and could you tell the girl. You go over. She is already watching you, the way people do when news is coming, and you realise the strips have been her map all night.

You hold out the lemonade. She takes it, drinks, and hands it back, and then she steps off the boards onto the bare sprung wood beyond the third line, where nobody has danced yet, and waits for you to follow. The band strikes up one last waltz anyway. Three lines, she says, and you can't tell whether she means the floor or the way out.