Black fine line infinity symbol with the word sister in cursive script, shown as a temporary tattoo on a wrist.

Infinity symbol with sister script

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A single black line drawing forms an infinity symbol, with the word sister written in flowing cursive across the right loop. The lower left panel shows the design on a paper sheet set on grass, and the lower right panel shows the same design applied to two wrists. The linework is uniform black ink with no shading and no colour.

Lettering Forearm Infinity symbol Sister Script Temporary tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, pull your chairs in, because the cold's coming off the water and this is the part where the gulls go quiet. You've heard about the Pell sisters and the rope. No? Then listen. Mags and Ottilie Pell were born eleven minutes apart in the back room of the chandlers on Quay Street, and before they could walk they were tying each other's laces into knots nobody could undo.

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When their father went down with the Esme off the Skerry, they inherited a net shed, a debt, and a fight nobody in the town could follow. Ottilie signed on with a container ship out of Liverpool and didn't write for three years. Mags stayed and mended nets for every boat that would have her. Still, every spring on the turn of the tide, the two of them met on the harbour wall. One summer they sat on the cold stones and spliced a single length of tarred line through both their hands, a figure of eight with no cut in it, so the rope ran round and round and never ended. They said that was the agreement. Nobody else needed to understand it.

In the February gales the ship's last report came through the harbour office, and Mags walked out to the wall with the coil over her shoulder. She tied one end to the iron bollard and waited with the wind coming off the sea like a slap. Near dawn a shape came in past the breakwater, and the lantern on its mast was Ottilie's. When she stepped onto the wall she carried the other end, frayed and salt-stiff, and the splice held exactly where they had left it.

The rope still hangs on the nail by the shed door. Run your thumb along it and you'll feel the place where the two ends meet, and you won't be able to tell which of them started it.