Black fine line tattoo of a To Do checklist with empty boxes and ruled lines across the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

To do list tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a black tattoo of a To Do checklist, with the words To Do written in a cursive hand above two columns of empty square boxes, each followed by a horizontal ruled line. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The checklist fills the width of the forearm, set against plain skin and a blurred blue background.

Fine line Forearm Line Handwriting

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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

Come closer, and mind the goat, she bites. Now, the man I'm telling you of was called Dougal Rennie, and he lived on the far side of Hallan, where the road gives up and the sheep take over. He kept a pencil behind one ear and a list in his coat pocket, and every morning he wrote it fresh on the back of a feed bill. Ten things, always ten, because his mother said a man who plans more than ten is only lying to the sea.

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The list never got shorter. Mend the gate at the bottom field. Fetch paraffin from Stromness. Tell Ailsa Moir he was sorry about the boat. Each evening he'd sit by the window with the pencil in his hand and tick nothing, because the ticks were for other men, and by dark the lead had blunted and the list had grown a new line at the foot of it. The neighbours laughed, and the gulls laughed louder.

Then came the winter the fog sat on the island for nine days and nobody could find the pier. On the tenth morning Dougal found the feed bill caught in the peat by the dyke. He read the list through once, slowly, the way you'd read a letter from someone who had died, and he understood at last that the empty boxes were not for ticking. They were for choosing. He put a single line through all ten, then turned the bill over and wrote just one thing on it: the tide turns at four.

He walked down to the shore at four with the paraffin tin under his arm and nothing else to carry. The sea, which is a patient creditor, took his apology and took his excuses and asked for nothing more. The gate, I'm told, still hangs crooked at the bottom field, which was the only item on that list he never got round to.