Fine line black tattoo of a vertical dot, zigzag line and looped shapes on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line loops and dot on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black vertical line runs down the nape of the neck, starting with a small dot at the top. Below it, a zigzag and a series of loops sit in a column, with a spiral or curled shape at the base. The linework is single weight and the tattoo is shown in black ink on smooth skin against a white top and dark hair.

Fine line Neck Dot Line Zigzag Loop Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands off that rope, our Jessie, it isn't yours to pull yet, and the overman will have my ears if you set the lamp swinging. Now, where was I? Ah yes, the plumb line. Old Wilf Carrick had the measuring of the Harrow Seam the spring the fault opened, and he hung a length of black cord down the shaft from a little brass dot screwed to the headgear. That dot was the true top of everything. Men below took their bearings from it, and a man who lost it lost the way home.

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The cord would not hang straight. Halfway down, the fault pushed the rock sideways, and the line kinked into a zigzag like a lad's hand trying to write in the dark. Wilf didn't cut it. He tied loops above and below the kink, wrapping and knotting until the weight settled, and he wound the spare length round a wooden drum at the base so it would never tangle again. Every turn on that drum was a shift he'd come up alive, he used to say, and he'd tap the cord and count them out loud.

The winter of the flood, a boy named Eli Dunn went down to free a stuck tub, and the cord went slack in Wilf's hands at the top like a pulse stopping. He hauled, hand over hand, and the rope came up wet and light with nothing on the end but the knot Eli had tied to keep himself from being swept off the ledge. They found the boy by the sound of the pumps, three levels down, sitting on the coil of his own spare cord with his lamp still lit.

Wilf kept that knot in his waistcoat pocket until the day he died. When anyone asked him what it was for, he'd only say it was the way back up.