White chalk-style sketch on dark paper of a heart-shaped fishing hook with a feathered fly lure and the words Gone Fishing in script.

Heart hook and feather lure with Gone Fishing script

Black and grey · Flash

A white chalk-style drawing on dark paper shows a heart-shaped fishing hook with a feathered fly lure at its lower end. The words Gone Fishing run diagonally in script beside the hook. The linework is loose and sketchy, with the feather fibres drawn as light strokes and no shading.

Heart Feather Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The slate by the back door still said GONE FISHING in Dennis's square capitals, though he had been gone nine months and the chalk had faded to a grey ghost. Maeve wiped the words away with the heel of her hand, then stood looking at the blank board for a long minute before writing them again in her own looser hand, underneath nothing at all, because the boat wanted seeing to and the tide was turning at six.

Keep reading

The fly box lived in the drawer under the tide tables. Among the hooks rusted to the colour of stewed tea was one he had bent into a heart, the curve so deliberate she guessed he had spent an evening over it with pliers and a candle. A grey hen feather was lashed to its eye with waxed thread gone yellow. She had never once seen him fish with it. He used to say the pollack off Porthkerris were too sensible for sentiment.

Next morning she took the Marigold out past the harbour wall on the ebb, the engine coughing twice before it caught. The gulls followed for a while and then gave up on her. She cast the heart-hook off the stern where the water went green over the ledge and waited, with no real hope, watching the feather lie on the surface like something dropped from a letter.

A pollack took it on the third cast, hard and angry. She laughed out loud on the empty water, a sound she had not heard from herself in months. She unhooked it with careful fingers, let it go, and turned for home with the sun coming through the murk. At the shed she rubbed out the slate once more and wrote, in capitals that leaned a little the way his did, BACK BY SIX.