A woman with long wavy blonde hair sits on a wooden jetty with a dark black and grey tattoo covering her arm from the upper arm to the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark tattoo on a bare arm on a dock

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind sits on a weathered wooden jetty in jeans and a white top, with her face hidden by her hair. Her left arm, resting on the planks, carries a dark tattoo running from the upper arm down to the forearm, with shading in black and grey. The background shows calm water, moored boats and a wooded shoreline under a bright sky.

Upper arm Forearm Sleeve Woman Boat Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the moorings list pinned to the chandlery door by seven, the way her father had, though nobody had asked her to keep it. The buoys off Sallow Point were numbered in white paint, and half of them had lost their digits to barnacles and bad winters. She knew which boat sat on which buoy the way other people knew birthdays.

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The trouble that Thursday was the Marigold Rose, a converted pilot cutter with a cracked stern post and an owner who had gone to Lisbon and not written. Nell rowed out in the grey light with a borrowed tender and a coil of new warp, and found the cutter's painter fouled on the next mooring. Someone had tied it there on purpose, or at least had not cared. The deck was slick with dew, and the cabin hatch stood open an inch, as if someone had only just stepped away.

She cut the fouled line with her knife and found, knotted into the bitter end, a brass ring and a folded chart of the estuary. Pencilled on the chart was a ring of tiny crosses, every one of them a buoy she had moored herself, and beside each cross a date. The last date was three days ago. She sat on the coaming a long while, watching the boats swing round on the turn of the tide, and wondered who had been counting them.

By the time the sun cleared the wood, she had re-tied the Rose to her own buoy, number nine, and pinned the chart inside the chandlery window beside the list. Nobody came to claim it. By noon she had added a cross of her own, and a date, and felt that it was the first honest thing she had written all week.