Black and grey infinity symbol tattoo on the ankle with tribal patterns in the loops and the word ohana in script across the centre.

Infinity symbol with ohana script on ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink infinity symbol sits on the side of an ankle, with the left loop filled with tribal-style bands and wave motifs and the right loop filled with dotted and scrolled patterns. The word ohana is written in a cursive script where the two loops cross. The photograph is black and white, with the ink appearing solid and the skin evenly lit against a dark background.

Blackwork Lettering Ankle Infinity symbol Ohana Script Tribal pattern Wave Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, the 4.10 is late again and it will be late till Tuesday, so you may as well hear it. My father kept the signal box at Kilnmoor when the branch line still ran in a figure of eight, two loops joined at a crossing where the rails met and never touched. Trains went round the left loop, pulled into the platform, then came back through the crossing and out round the right. The surveyor's mistake, the company called it, and they never bothered to fix it, because the trains kept coming home.

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The year of the great flood, the river came over the water meadows and took the bridge at Lowe. Three wagons of a goods train sat stranded on the far side, and the men on the left loop could see their lamps bobbing across the water. My father would not let the signal drop for anyone until every crew had been counted. He wrote the names in chalk on the slate by the lever frame, and when the last lamp came through the crossing, he rubbed that name out himself with his thumb.

He had picked up a word from a sailor who'd jumped ship in Cardiff, ohana, which meant family, and a rule that went with it: nobody gets left behind. Nobody on that line ever asked where a loop began. You leave by one rail and come home by the other, and the crossing is the only place you meet yourself going the opposite way.

The box is shut now, but the slate is still on the wall. You can't read the names any more, only the ghost of the chalk where he rubbed them out, faint as breath on glass. Every one of them made it through the crossing, love. That's the part he wanted you to know.