Fine line black tattoo of two hands forming a heart above a chain, placed on the side of the ribs.

Hands forming a heart over a chain on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single-needle style outline of two wrists and hands meeting to form a heart shape, with a short chain running along the lower edge. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the ribcage against plain pale skin.

Fine line Ribs Hand Heart Chain Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet had come in two cobles short, and still the women on the slip would not go home. Morag Liddell stood at the end of the stone with her hands tucked into her shawl, watching the grey water for the lamp her husband had promised to show from the headland.

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Tam had gone out with his brother Ross in the Brightwater, the last boat in Scarva Bay that carried a chain on her bow instead of rope. Old Hector who kept the net shed said the chain had come off a wreck at the Skerries, and that a chain never forgot what it had held. Morag had never liked it. It was heavy and cold, and it rang against the stones whenever the tide turned.

Near midnight a light came round the point, low and unsteady. At first light the Brightwater was hauled up the slip, her bow chain looped twice around a broken keel. Tam and Ross were still in the water-soaked wool they had worn to sea, and their hands had been folded together through the last link, palm against palm, fingers hooked, knuckles white as shell. Hector said they had held on to each other all night and the chain had held them both. Nobody could prise them apart, so they were carried up the slip like that.

Morag would not let the chain be sold for scrap. She hung it on a nail above the net shed door, where it still hangs, and the fishermen touch the last link on their way out to sea. The metal is worn bright in one place only, a heart's width across, where two pairs of hands once kept their grip through the dark.