Black and grey tattoo of a stylised townscape with brick houses, chimneys, rain clouds and an arched doorway on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Townscape with chimneys on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows a stylised town of brick houses, pitched roofs, tall chimneys and an arched doorway, with rain falling from a cloud above. The linework is bold and outlined, with hatching, stippling and solid black areas giving depth to the walls and roofs. The ink is black and grey only, and the forearm is held out in front of a standing person whose face is not shown.

Forearm Building House Chimney Rain Cloud Arch Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways off the sound that Tuesday, and you counted the chimneys of Harl Quay from the harbour wall the way your mother taught you: twelve, and eleven if you left out the one bricked up since the war. The last ferry had gone without you. Its wake was still smoothing out on the grey water when Agnes Tulloch leaned out of the chandlery and shouted that the arch was open again, as if you had asked.

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The arch under the terrace was the old road to the drying sheds, a tunnel of wet stone that smelled of tar and gull feathers. Someone had scratched three small crosses into the lintel, one for each boat the island lost in the last bad winter. You stopped beneath them and touched the cold brick, and you thought of the letter in your coat pocket, folded so many times its creases had gone soft as cloth.

Agnes was waiting at the far end with a lamp. The house with the tall window had been empty since her brother went out after the herring and did not come back, and every night for thirty-one years she had lit the lamp in that window anyway. She did not ask what the letter said. She only pressed a key into your palm, heavy and iron, and told you the stove in the back room still drew if you fed it dry peat first.

You climbed the stair in the dark. At the top the window was already glowing, and beyond the slates the cloud had begun to thin over the bay, the rain easing from a roar to a patter. You set your bag down, struck a match for the stove, and left the lamp burning on the sill where anyone coming in off the water could see it.