Free word tattoo on the back of a hand
Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo
A woman rests her hand on her shoulder, showing a thin black ink tattoo of the word free in a flowing script across the back of the hand. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the lettering runs diagonally from the knuckle towards the wrist. The image is warm in tone, with the skin, a denim shirt and turquoise rings and beaded bracelets surrounding the tattoo.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Dad said a rope had to be made fast or it would go wherever the tide took it, so every morning on Skerrow Quay I stood at the iron bollard and tied the bowline the way he'd shown me: rabbit up the hole, round the tree, back down the hole. Mrs Hobday from the chandlery watched me do it once and laughed. "You want the free end, love, not the made end. The made end's the boat's business. The free end is the bit that gets to answer."
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The summer I was eleven, the Gannet Mary went out on the morning ebb and didn't come back on the flood. Nobody talked about it on the quay. They mended nets, sold cod and looked at the water as if it owed them money. I kept tying knots. I told myself the boat had simply slipped its moorings to see what lay past the breakwater.
In October a postcard came, stained at one corner, with a harbour I didn't recognise on the front. On the back, in pencil, in handwriting that leaned like a mast in a gale, was one word: free. No name. Mrs Hobday read it over my shoulder and pressed her lips together, and I saw she was crying, and then she was laughing, and she said it was the most sensible thing my father had ever done.
I still tie the bowline every morning. The free end I leave long, so it can swing and reach for whatever is out there.
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