Small fine line black bow tattoo on the middle finger of a hand with dark red nail polish, resting palm down on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line bow on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black bow is drawn in fine outline on the middle finger, with a thin line running through it that suggests a ribbon or string. The linework is delicate and even, with minimal solid fill and no shading. The image is a close, well-lit photograph of an open hand with dark nail polish against a white paper towel background.

Fine line Hand Bow Ribbon Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats went out from Skerrow whenever the weather allowed, and in the winter of the bad herring Marta Oll tied a length of blue ribbon to the mainline of her father's boat before he sailed. She tied it in a bow, the way her mother tied her hair, and she said nothing about it, because her father would only have laughed.

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The ribbon went out with the Sea Cormorant and came home with him every evening for six weeks. The other wives asked what it was for. Marta said it kept the line from tangling, which was a lie, and then she said it kept the string true, which nobody had heard before. Abel Crane, who mended nets on the slipway, looked at it and said a bow was only a knot that could be undone with one pull. 'That's the whole point of it,' he said. 'You can always get home by pulling.'

In the seventh week the wind swung round after noon and the fleet ran for harbour. Four boats made it in. The Cormorant did not, and by dusk the breakwater lamp had burned an hour with no one coming past it. Marta walked the shingle with a lantern until her arms ached. Near the tide line she found the mainline caught on a black rock, and tied to it, dry where the water had not reached, the blue bow, still holding its shape.

She did not cry on the shingle. She took the ribbon home and tied it to the tiller of the dinghy, and the next morning she went out with Abel at the oars to look for what the sea had kept. They came back by afternoon with a sack of sprats and no boat. Abel said the sea had taken the Cormorant and given back the line, which was fair enough, since it was the only trade the sea had ever offered anyone in Skerrow.