Fine line black tattoo of an upside-down cursive word inside an outlined downward triangle on the inner forearm.

Upside-down script inside a fine line triangle

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline of a downward-pointing triangle sits on the inner forearm, with a cursive word written upside down inside it. The linework is thin, even and single-needle, with no shading and no fill. The ink is solid black on pale skin against a blurred grey background, so the composition is simple and centred on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Triangle Script Word Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old gardener at Fenmere pinned his words to the glasshouse wall, one for each season, and nobody in the village thought it odd until the spring his neighbour's boy asked why the word for the pear tree was written upside down.

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"Because it's the roots I'm writing for," Hal Pellow said, and he sent the boy off with a trowel and a warning about the bindweed. That evening he took three bean canes, bound them into a point, and pressed the word into the bed beneath them with the blunt end of a dibber, one letter at a time, every letter backwards to the sky. The village said he had gone soft in the head after his wife died. Hal only said that roots read differently from below.

The pear came up crooked and slow. Tom Ashby grew tall on its windfalls and forgot the joke until he was a man with his own allotment, and it was Tom who came back the winter Hal's hands began to shake. The old man could no longer kneel, so Tom knelt for him. The bed had gone dark and cold, but the soil was loose along the line of the canes, and when Tom brushed it clear he found the pear's roots had spread through the word, thickening where the strokes ran, so that the whole thing was there in pale wood.

He read it the right way round, as the roots did. Then he stood, brushed the earth from his knees, and told Hal the tree had taken it in. Hal smiled at the glasshouse glass and asked whether the pears were sweet this year. Tom said they were, and it was the truest thing he had said all winter.