A shaded realism style tattoo of a double helix DNA strand on skin, with red, orange, yellow, green and blue coloured rungs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Double helix DNA strand tattoo

Realism · Mixed · Photo

A double helix in the form of two shaded, ribbon-like strands twists vertically down the image. The ribbons are rendered in grey and black with highlights, and the rungs between them carry bands of red, orange, yellow, green and blue. The tattoo is centred on a plain, pinkish area of skin with soft, even lighting.

Realism

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The cook on the Ardent Mary has finally let me have the galley to myself for an hour, which means I am sitting on an upturned crate with the bread proving under a wet cloth and your letter propped against the tin of pepper. You asked what I do with the old rope. Everything, love. Nothing goes over the side in this boat while there's a sound yard left in it.

Bosun Pryce showed me the two-strand lay on Tuesday, when the stern warp chafed through. Two hawser strands twisting round each other, both turned the same way, so you can't tell at a glance which one is holding which. Then he unpicked a foot of it and showed me the marker yarns: a red thread laid into one strand, a blue into the other, so the whole length always says where it was made and which way it should run. He said a sailor who knows his lay can splice a rope blind in a gale.

I thought of your mam's kitchen then, the little bands of cotton she ran through the hem of everything, and the drawer where she kept them sorted by colour. Last night the wind dropped and I sat with a stub of rope in my hands, following the colours down. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, then red again, every few inches, on a thread that never breaks.

Keep the bread warm for me. I'll be home for the Christmas fish.

Love, Dad