Fine line black tattoo of a vertical line, a small coil and looping swirls on the inner forearm, with a short line of script tattooed nearer the wrist.

Fine line loops and script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single thin black line descends into a small coil and a pair of looping, infinity-like swirls. A short line of small script sits further down the forearm, closer to the wrist. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the composition is centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Fine line Forearm Vertical line Loop Swirl Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lead line was older than my grandfather, and he would not let anyone else coil it. Each morning before the boats went out, he sat on an upturned crate at the harbour wall and worked the rope through his hands, feeling for the marks. Two fathoms was a strip of red bunting. Three was a leather tab. Five was a white rag, and seven was a scrap of blue wool from a jumper my uncle never came home in.

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"Depth is only a question of what you're willing to let go of," he said the first time he put the lead in my palm. It was a brass weight shaped like a bell, cold as a coin, and it pulled my arm straight toward the stones. I learned to feel the bottom through the line, the small shiver when the weight touched sand, the dead slack when it found weed.

The fog came in off the point the autumn I turned fourteen, thick enough that the boats came home by sound alone. My grandfather could no longer stand for long, so I took the small boat to the mouth of the channel and dropped the lead, calling out whatever marks I could find with my fingers. Four. Three and a half. My voice cracked on the next fathom, and I knew I was the only one out there who could still hear the shore bell through the grey.

When the last boat nosed in, my grandfather took the line from me without a word. He ran it slowly through his hands, found the blue wool, and tied a fresh knot just beyond it. "Now you are the one who knows where the bottom is," he said, and went home to his tea.