Four hand-drawn fine line tattoo designs of spirals, loops and zigzags with dotted tails, drawn in dark ink on cream paper.

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Four spiral and loop line designs

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Four vertical designs are drawn in dark brown ink on a cream background. Each one combines a spiral at the top, stacked loops or a zigzag in the middle, and a thin single line ending in a small dot or dots. The linework is even and uncoloured, with no shading.

Fine line Spiral Loop Zigzag Line Dot Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The four boats of Skerrow Bay went out past the bar every morning, and every morning the old woman on the slipway counted them with a knotted cord. Four loops for four hulls. She tied a spiral at the top of each, as her mother had, so that the wind would turn back before it reached the nets.

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One autumn the youngest boat, the Greylag, came in without its skipper. The men said the sea had taken him. The old woman said nothing. She unpicked the cord and tied it again, one knot short, then walked down to the water and waited for the tide to lay its wrack in lines along the shingle.

Three days later a boy came up from the rocks carrying a fish basket. Inside was a single mackerel and a length of wet rope coiled tight. He said the skipper had been caught on the Hob reef, lashed to a stake, and had kept himself alive by tying zigzags through the rails so the others could find the gap in the rocks. The old woman took the cord, counted again, and this time the count came right.

She never told anyone how she knew. The Greylag went out the next morning with a crew of two, and the cord hung on its post all winter, a stem with a spiral at the top and a single line running down to a dot of salt.