Black outlined fish hook tattoo with the year 2008 and a small red heart, sitting on the side of the ribs.

Fish hook with 2008 and red heart on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A fish hook outline wraps around the words 2008 with a small red heart beside the year. The hook is drawn with a bold black outline and light grey shading, while the heart is the only colour in the design. The tattoo sits diagonally on the side of the torso, with a purple fabric edge visible at the top of the frame.

Ribs Heart Text

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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

Dear Nell, Dad's tackle tin came up from the cellar this morning, rust-spotted and smelling of the Witham, and at the bottom I found the hook you bent that summer when you were fourteen and furious with everything. You had tied it to a length of green nylon and swore the pike would be too proud to refuse it. It refused nothing. It took the hook, the reel and most of Dad's patience before it snapped the line at the weir.

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That hook was the only thing we agreed on that year. Mum had left the caravan in March, so we fished every evening from the bank below Stixwould because the water asked nothing of us. Dad wrote 2008 on the lid of the tin in red biro and said it was the year the river stopped being ours and started being ours again. I never understood that. I still don't.

Last week the council drained the old lock for works and the mud was full of bream and sunken prams. I walked the length of it with a bucket and found a rusted hook, nothing like yours, still knotted with a scrap of nylon. I brought it home and set it on the windowsill beside the heart-shaped stone you painted and never came back for.

Come up at Easter and bring the reel. We'll see whether the river remembers either of us.