Small black blackwork tattoo of a winged crest made of triangles, placed on the inner forearm of a person wearing a grey top.

Triangle crest with wings on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a small tattoo of a winged crest built from solid black triangles and angular shapes, placed on the inner forearm. The linework is bold and filled, with no shading, and the ink is sharply defined against the skin. The image is framed in a neutral, softly lit setting with the wrist and hand visible below the tattoo.

Blackwork Forearm Crest Triangle Wing Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet out of Skerrow had worked the Thrum for two hundred years without once agreeing on a thing, so when the three boats came limping back through the gap with their holds full and their crews still shouting, nobody argued about the mark that went on their sterns. Three black triangles stacked like a broken stair, with wings fanning out either side, sharp as a kite's spars. The old women said it was the wings that brought the boats home. The men said it was a Dutch sailmaker's design and the Dutchman had charged them for it.

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Ruth Abernethy was twelve the winter her father's boat, the Wren, went into the Thrum and did not come out. She stood on the quay with a pot of black her mother had been saving for the cottage door and watched the grey water flatten over nothing. When the spring boats were launched she was the one who climbed up the stern of the Corvel with a brush, and she painted the triangles first, because triangles were easy. The wings took her three attempts. The first ran into the wood grain, the second looked like a crow's foot, and the third she made with her eyes shut, tracing the shape the gulls made over the harbour at dusk.

Her uncle laughed and said the mark would bring nothing but bad luck if a girl painted it. The Corvel went out that May and came back heavy. The next boat asked her too, then the next, until every stern in the fleet wore her crooked wings. Nobody thought to ask why the wings lifted and the triangles pointed down.

Ruth never answered that. Each evening she walked the quay and counted the marks against the names chalked on the board, and each evening the sea gave back one or two of them and kept the rest. When they hauled the Wren up that autumn, the paint on her stern had worn to nothing but the wings, and they were still sharp enough to lift a hand to.