A woman with a small black script tattoo and a coloured design on her forearm, with cliffs and the sea behind her.

Forearm tattoos above a sea cove

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with her face turned away and hair blowing across it raises one arm, showing a small black script tattoo on the inner forearm and a coloured design higher up the arm. Behind her a rocky limestone cliff drops towards deep blue water, with a white rock stack and green scrub in the foreground. The image is a bright, mostly natural-light outdoor photograph with the tattoos in the lower left.

Forearm Script Sea Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stack was called the Widow's Thumb, and every child in Sauvelle knew it was bad luck to row past it after the bell. Old Marthe Lanquetin said the rock had once been a fisherman who turned to stone while looking for his wife's boat. Nobody believed her, but nobody rowed past it either.

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Pell Aubrac, the youngest net-mender on the quay, did not believe a word of it. He had a ring of bright tin that he meant to give Ysolde, the baker's girl from the cove road, and he meant to set it on the thumb of the rock itself so the whole town would see he was not afraid. He had a swallow inked on his arm for the sea road, red and blue, with a word beneath it that his mother had sworn over: patience. He rowed out at dusk with the tin tucked inside his shirt.

The water was flat as a plate. At the foot of the stack the swell lifted and sank, and something knocked twice against the hull. He tied off, climbed the wet ledge, and found the rock warm as bread. He pressed the ring into a crack, said her name aloud, and the gulls went quiet. When he turned around, the boat had drifted a full oar's length away and the harbour bell was ringing for the evening tide.

He swam back. On the quay next morning Marthe sat with her knitting and looked at his arm. "You've been out to the thumb," she said. "Did you leave it?" He nodded. She counted stitches. "Then you'll wait for the tide to decide, same as the rest of us." That was all she said. In the spring Ysolde walked down the cove road, saw the ring still shining in its crack, and went out in her own boat to fetch it.