Black and grey fine line tattoo of a chain of bubble-like beads wrapping the ankle and running across the top of a foot to a lotus flower and om symbol.

Bead chain anklet with lotus and om symbol

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A chain of shaded bubble-like beads joined by thin black lines wraps around the ankle and runs across the top of the foot, ending in an outlined lotus flower and an om symbol. The linework is fine and the beads and lotus petals are shaded in grey to give them volume. The image is in black and grey and is framed close on the foot against a dark surface.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Bubble Lotus Om symbol Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the herring turned, the glass floats were already hung along the net like a string of cold pearls, and your aunt Morag was still picking knots loose with a bent nail. She did not look up when you sat down beside her on the wet boards. "Forty-one floats," she said. "Your father counted them twice before he went out, and he counted the bad ones too."

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The bad ones had bubbles trapped in the glass, little silver stars you could only see if you held them up to the grey light coming off the water. Morag lifted one and flicked it with her thumbnail, and it rang like a spoon against a cup. "Cracked," she said, and dropped it in the bucket with the others. You knew she was not only talking about glass. Your father had been three nights past the agreed hour, and the radio in the harbour office had gone quiet on Tuesday.

You took the next float from the crate and turned it over. Inside, a faint bloom of air had settled against the wall of the glass, the shape of a lotus opening, the way the old chandler had promised it would if the bead was blown in a good furnace. He had also told you that the engineer on the Ceres scratched a small om into the wheelhouse rail every spring, for luck, and that the sea did not care which god you asked so long as you asked it properly.

At dusk the fleet came in low and slow, eleven boats where there should have been twelve. You threaded the last float onto the line and tied it off with the knot your father taught you, the one that slips if you pull the wrong way. Morag stood, wiped her hands on her apron, and said nothing at all. Out past the breakwater a lantern swung twice, then once, and you began counting the floats again.