Black tribal band tattoo wrapping a forearm, with bold solid shapes, triangles and spirals, photographed in black and white.

Tribal band tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A clenched fist and forearm show a solid black band of tribal-style pattern around the forearm, with large curved shapes, spirals and a row of triangles. The linework is bold and the shapes are filled solid black, with the band ending in a straight edge. The photograph is black and white against a checkered floor and a dark garment at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had been sent to the salt terraces to count tide-marks, and the pump-station keeper gave her a tin disc stamped with a band of pattern: half circles filled solid black, spirals that curled into themselves, and a row of triangles that marched off one edge like a fence. "Read that and you'll know when the water comes back," he said, then went back to his kettle without looking at her.

Keep reading

She copied it into her ledger over three nights, matching each spiral to a sluice gate and each triangle to a day. The half circles, she decided, were the high tides, and where the black was thickest the pumps had failed. The band ran to a straight edge, and nobody on the terraces could say whether the pattern ended there or whoever made it had simply run out of tin.

On the fourth morning the wind swung round and the sluice hum dropped away. Mara climbed the gate tower and found the last triangles pointing the way the sea would come, low over the flats. She took a bucket of chalk and a lamp and walked the pale ground until she reached the place where the drawing stopped, and she drew a line there.

By noon the water had crept up to her chalk and stopped, exactly where the straight edge said it would. The keeper came out with two cups of tea and stood beside her without a word. "Then you read it," he said, and handed her one. She watched the grey sheet lap at the line she had drawn and go no further.

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