Grey shaded fishing hook tattoo with the word Dad in script inside its curve and a red heart-shaped barb, on the top of a foot.

Fishing hook with Dad script on foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A fishing hook tattoo with the word Dad written in cursive script inside its curve. The hook is shaded in greys with highlights, and the barb end is shaped as a heart filled with red. The hook runs diagonally across the top of a foot against a plain skin background.

Lettering Other Heart Script lettering Dad

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hook had been in the tin box since the spring the mill pond froze, and Maggie Tallow only opened the box because its lid had rusted shut and she needed something sharp for the hem of her coat. Her father's tackle lay inside in a nest of oiled wool: two reels, a knife with a bone handle, and a single hook no bigger than a thumbnail, its barb filed to a point, with a twist of red wool wound round the shank.

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She had been nine when he showed her how to bend the eye of a hook over a loop of gut and how to wet the knot with spit before drawing it tight. He never said anything wise while he did it. He only said, "Again," until her fingers stopped shaking and the knot sat in her palm like a seed.

Forty years he fished the same stretch of river, and the village said he could find trout in a puddle. The forest path that ran from the back of Thornley down to the water was the only road he ever walked without complaint. She followed it now with the box under her arm, past the alders where he had hung his coat every Sunday, to the bend where the water went slow and brown.

She cast once, badly. The line landed on the far bank and she laughed, the first time since the funeral, and something tugged, just once, as if someone at the other end had decided to answer. She reeled in an empty hook with the red wool still bright, and she stood on the bank holding it, knowing he had tied it so she would have to come back.