Close-up of a black ribbon-style knot tattoo with three purple flowers on a forearm, with small lettering at the left edge.

Black ribbon knot and violets on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black ribbon-style knot with looping, scrolled ends runs across the forearm, with three purple five-petalled flowers with pale highlights and small yellow centres layered over it. Small lettering sits at the left edge of the design. The black linework is bold with soft grey shading on the ribbon, and the flowers are rendered in shaded purples against the skin tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishermen's wives of Skerrow tied a black ribbon to the mast of every boat that went past the headland, and they tied it in a knot their grandmothers had taught them, two loops and a pair of curls at the ends so the sea would not know where to begin untying it. Nobody remembered why black. Ada Penhallow said it was because the sea takes the colour from everything, so you gave it the one it could not take back.

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When the Marigold went out in the spring of the bad year, Ada's son Tom was aboard, and Ada had tied the knot herself at the rail, her fingers stiff from the cold. Three weeks later the boat came home with four men instead of five, and the ribbon was still knotted to the mast, frayed white at the edges. Ada did not untie it. She took the violets from the sill of her kitchen window, where she had been coaxing them out of the damp, and pressed them into the knot one by one, purple on black, until the mast looked as though it had grown something.

The men said afterwards that the sea lay flat for the whole of the next voyage, and that the Marigold came back with the ribbon still tight and the violets brown but whole. Ada kept that mast ribbon in a drawer for the rest of her life. When people asked her what it was for, she said it was for the one who had not come back, and the flowers were for the one who had.

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