Black and white photo of two hands with fine dotwork tattoos on the fingers, forming chain-like geometric patterns with small triangles and crosses.

Dotwork finger chain tattoos on both hands

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest on a dark surface, with dotwork and fine line tattoos running along the fingers. Each design forms a chain-like pattern of dots, small triangles, diamonds and crosses that drapes across the knuckles and joints. The image is black and white, and the thin, evenly spaced linework stands out clearly against the skin.

Dotwork Fine line Geometric Hand Dot Chain Triangle Cross Diamond Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Gullhaven the nets were mended by the women, because the men were too far out to mend anything. Old Marit kept her needle in a biscuit tin, and every spring she tied a row of tiny knots along the twine so the fleet could find its own boats in fog. The knots were dots to the eye. The fishermen said a dot was a fish that had got away, a triangle was a gull turning for land, and a cross was the church bell that called them home.

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One March the fog came down on the Thursday and did not lift. Three boats were still past the reef. Marit's grandson Tobias, who had only just been given a boat of his own, asked her for the longest net in the loft, the one she had knotted with a chain of triangles and diamonds, the pattern that could be seen by lantern. She gave it to him without asking why, and she did not ask him to bring it back.

He strung the net from the stern and walked the shingle with the lantern, counting the knots as they came up out of the grey. The triangles pointed the way to the harbour mouth. The diamonds marked the shoals where the water turned green. Where the chain ended in a cross, he knew he was home. Two boats came in on the ebb, and the third, the one with his father aboard, followed the last diamond in by feel.

Marit never asked for the net back. Each spring after, she pricked a fresh row of dots into the twine, and the children of Gullhaven learned to read them before they could read words. Nobody in the village could say when the custom started, only that the knots always pointed toward home.