Black and white photo of a fine line tattoo of a vertical stem with loops and a swirl, placed centrally on the chest between the breasts.

Fine line swirl and loops on the chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a small tattoo on a woman's chest, with her open plaid shirt framing the torso and her face cropped out of frame. The tattoo is a single thin black line running vertically, with small loops, a curled tail and a swirling base. The ink is crisp and even, and the composition centres the design in the middle of the frame.

Fine line Chest Line Loop Swirl

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, for the wind on Skerra Ness does not like a tale told loud. Every boat-wife there kept a line of knots on a nail beside her door. Old Morag Tulloch's ran from the lintel to the floor. She tied a loop in it each morning her man put out past the skerries, and a little curl each night he came home to the harbour. Nobody asked her why she did it. They knew.

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The winter the Brightwater went down, Morag kept tying loops for eleven weeks after the other women had stopped looking at the water. She tied them in the dark with the twine between her teeth. Her grandson Ruaridh, who was nine and believed in nothing he could not eat, sat on the bench and counted them aloud until he lost his place and started again from the top.

In the spring the sea gave back a sea-chest, then a plank, then nothing more. Morag took the line down from the nail. She looked at the last swirl at the bottom, the tail she had never finished because she had not wanted to be done. She handed the line to the boy and told him to tie the final loop himself. He did, badly, with his tongue poking out the side of his mouth.

That is why the line hangs by the door still, Ruaridh says, one knot clumsy and one knot tight. If you lean close you will see the bottom curls back on itself, the way a wave does when it has nowhere left to go but home.