Fine line black tattoo of vertical script characters, including an om-like symbol at the top, on the inner forearm.

Vertical script tattoo on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a thin, vertical line of script characters tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist, with the largest glyph at the top. The linework is delicate and uniform, with no shading, and the glyphs are spaced evenly down the arm. The pale skin and dark background give the design strong contrast, and the framing is close and centred on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Om symbol Script Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penhallow kept the boarding house at Saltcote because her husband had drowned off the point and the rooms were paid for until the roof fell in. In October a guest came to the back room with one trunk and paid three months in advance. He never came down to breakfast. Each morning Ada left the tray outside his door, and each evening it came back with the same cold toast on it, and a sheet of paper folded under the saucer with a few marks drawn down the middle like a fence.

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Ada could not read them. The grocer's boy could not either. The vicar said they were the marks of some eastern tongue and that the man was likely a clerk, and a clerk who wrote by the tide was no harm to anyone. Still, she took one sheet to the window and held it to the grey light, reading from the top down, the way the marks seemed to want to be read. The first mark, the biggest, hummed in her chest like the bell at the lifeboat house.

On the last night of the lease he came down the stairs with the trunk left behind and a fresh sheet in his hand. He pointed at the marks with one finger and said only, "It means keep going, when the water is high." Then he walked out along the shingle toward the point with the lamp still unlit, and nobody in Saltcote saw him again.

Ada kept the back room aired and the tray laid for years. She never learned the rest of the word. But when the tide came in hard over the sea wall she would stand at the top of the stairs and say the first mark aloud, and the house, which had stood through three storms, stayed put.