A bold black calligraphic stroke on a white background, curving from a sharp upper point into a loop at the base, shown as a standalone design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black curved calligraphic stroke design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a single solid black symbol on a plain white background, shaped like a tapering calligraphic stroke. It starts with a sharp point at the top, swells into a long curve, and ends in a rounded loop at the bottom. The edges are smooth and the shape is filled solid black with no shading or added colour, so it reads as a drawn design rather than a photograph of skin.

Symbol Curve Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down nearer the fire, and mind the cat, for this is a story my grandmother told me the winter the herring failed us. She said it was true, and she never once told me a lie that I could catch. On the island of Skerrin there was a smith called Donnchadh who made hooks for every man on the shore. One year he took a nail from the timbers of a drowned boat, heated it white, and pulled it out with one long stroke of the hammer, so that it tapered to a point at the top and curled round at the bottom like the end of a wave. He hung it on the wall and said nothing of it.

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That autumn the fog came down thick off the Gannet Rock, and Mairead's brother went out after mackerel and did not come back before dark. The men said the sea had him. Mairead went down to the shingle with the strange hook in her apron pocket and a length of tarred line in her hands. She did not cast it. She laid it in the surf and let the tide draw it out and round, and the loop of iron turned the water the way a hand turns a key. The current bent itself into the shape of that hook, a long swell and then a curl, and the boat came in along it as if it had been drawn on a chart.

Mairead's brother stepped out of the fog with his nets empty and his face grey, and he swore the sea had lifted the boat and set it down gently on the right side of the rocks. The hook went back on the smithy wall, and it has hung there ever since. If you hold it up to that window at evening, the last light runs down its curve like water poured from a jug, and you will understand why no one on Skerrin has ever tried to fish with it.