Small black dotwork bow tattoo on the back of a baby's hand, with the fingers curled against a soft peach blanket.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork bow on a baby's hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small bow shape is formed from black dots on the back of a baby's hand and wrist. The dots are evenly spaced and stippled, with no outline or shading. The hand is in soft focus against a warm, pale blanket, with the tattoo as the sharpest point of the frame.

Dotwork Hand Bow Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sailmaker's shop smelled of tar and wet canvas the morning Aunt Vi taught me to prick a bow. She sat me on an upturned bucket by the window, gave me a needle as fine as a wasp's sting and a scrap of spare jib, and told me that a bow was only a knot that had decided to be pretty.

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I made a dozen before I got one right. Dots, she said, not lines. A line pulls and frays in the weather, but a dot sits where you put it and holds. We pricked the loops out in little pinpricks, close enough that the cloth looked dusted with pepper, and left them for the sea to find.

The Mary Eliza went out on the ebb in February with a dotted bow stitched beside her name, which Vi said was for luck and I said was for show. Nobody in the harbour argued that Vi's bows brought boats home, though. Every sail she pricked came back through the harbour mouth with its loops still standing, even when the rigging around them had gone to ribbons.

When the boat came in on the flood three days later, Vi was already on the quay with a fresh bow in her coat pocket. She pressed it into my palm, warm from her hand, and said, 'Your turn to tie the ones that matter.' I still keep it in a tin on the windowsill. The dots have faded to the colour of old rust, and when I look at it I count them the way she taught me, one, two, a knot that nobody would ever need to untie.