Black and grey fine line tattoos of a large outlined polygon on the forearm and a smaller hexagon on the upper arm, in a black and white photograph.

Two outlined geometric shapes on the arms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two thin black outlines of geometric shapes sit on separate arms, a larger polygon on the left forearm and a smaller hexagon on the upper arm beside it. The linework is even and fine with no shading, and the shapes are unfilled, leaving the skin visible inside them. The black and white photograph has a plain dark background, with the two arms placed close together in the frame.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Upper arm Polygon Hexagon Outline Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's wife had measured the pentagon wrong on purpose, and Tomasz only learned it when the cutter came to the barn with its brass callipers and asked why the sides did not close. We had argued about it for a week in the cold kitchen, my father saying a shape was a shape and my mother saying a shape was a promise nobody had kept. The hexagon was hers, the small one, drawn in pencil on a sheet of vellum that smelled of tallow and lamp oil. She had counted six corners the way other women counted children.

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The cutter was a patient man from the county office. He laid the vellum on the table, traced the outline with one finger, and said that the larger figure could not sit beside the smaller without one of them bending. He wanted to know which of us would do the bending. Nobody answered him. Outside the window the frost was writing its own lines on the glass, and I remember thinking those lines were worth more than anything in the room.

In the spring we took the pentagon down to the river and set it into the mud at the ford, a clean five-cornered gap where the water could not settle. My mother stood at one corner and my father at another, and I stood where the lines met, and we watched the current try to find its way through the angles and fail. The hexagon we kept on the mantel, pale and unfilled, the room showing through it. It was the only thing in the house that had never once been asked to hold anything.