Fine line black tattoo of two hands holding a criss-crossed string between them, placed on the thigh.

Hands holding a string on the thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A small fine line tattoo shows two outlined hands pulling a string taut between them, with several crossing strands forming a loose web. The linework is thin, even and black, with no shading or fill. The tattoo sits on the front of a pale thigh beneath a denim skirt, against a plain background with a brick wall.

Fine line Thigh Hand String Thread Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The string had slackened again by the third bell, and Ivo kept lifting it back into shape with his thumbs the way Old Pim had shown him. Between his hands the loops hung in their crossing lattice, taut enough to hum when the wind caught the rigging. Pim sat on an upturned bucket by the galley hatch, peeling potatoes into a tin bowl and not watching.

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'You're holding it like it'll bite,' Pim said. 'Hold it like you mean to keep it.' Ivo had come aboard at Falmouth with a duffel and a letter he wasn't supposed to open, and for six weeks nobody had asked him a single question. Pim asked none now. He only lifted his own hands, knuckles red from brine, and showed the next figure, the one called the Manger, then the Bridge, then the Lighthouse, which made Ivo laugh until the boatswain bellowed from the forecastle.

Off the Azores the swell came up grey and long, and the cradle went clean out of Ivo's head. He forgot the loops, forgot the letter, forgot the names. On the morning they raised the coast of Brazil, Pim's bucket stood empty and the bowl sat full of peel. Ivo found the string wound round a nail beside the hatch, pulled tight the old way, and under it a sheet of galley paper with every crossing drawn in pencil and numbered, the way a man writes out a course.

He took the string up in both hands and the strands fell into their web without him thinking, as though they had been waiting for him. Forward, the lookout called land. Ivo stood in the wind and held the shape until his fingers ached, because it was the only thing aboard he knew the next move of.