Black and white photo of a vertical column of small dark ink marks on the upper arm, beside floral fabric and long hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical column of marks on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a vertical column of small, dense black marks on the upper arm, close to the shoulder, with the person's long hair falling across the frame. The marks are short strokes, dots and angular shapes arranged in tight rows, with fine, crisp edges. The image is monochrome, so the ink appears as black and the surrounding skin and patterned fabric as soft greys.

Upper arm Symbol Dot Column

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had counted the bells for nine winters before anyone thought to ask what the marks meant. The column ran down the inside of the vestry door at Coldharbour, a hand's width apart, each little stroke a thing the village had agreed to remember. Dots for the births. Angled notches for the ones who went over the ridge and did not come back down. Nell learned them the way other girls learned their letters, by copying until her wrist ached.

Keep reading

Then the frost came early that year, and the wood at the edge of the village went silent in a way the old men said they had heard only once before. Nell took the ink pot and the thin brush up the lane before light. The beeches had dropped everything. She stood beneath the oldest one and drew the column on its bark in soot and water, row after row, because the vestry door was too low a place to keep a count that had grown this long.

Her brother Tom had gone in after the lost heifer three days earlier. She had not written his mark yet. Writing it would make it true.

When the last row was finished, the wind came through the trees and lifted a single leaf onto the wet soot. Nell pressed it flat with her thumb, and the mark beside it looked, for the first time, like a door left ajar. She went home for her coat and bread, and she did not look back at the bark, because she had already seen the light moving between the trunks, coming her way.