Black lettering tattoo reading Through Thick and Thin around an infinity symbol, with a dot either side, in lettering style on bare skin.

Infinity symbol with Through Thick and Thin lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink infinity symbol sits at the centre of the tattoo, with the words THROUGH above and THICK AND THIN below, set in an oval arrangement with a small dot on each side. The linework is solid and even, with the letters in a plain sans-serif style and no shading or colour. The photograph is a close, straight-on view of the skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Infinity Lettering Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net is still wet when you start mending it, and Tom is already shouting from the wheelhouse that the tide won't wait for anyone's knots. You sit on an upturned fish box at Halvard Quay with the twine looped round your palm, working the needle through the same figure-of-eight pattern your father taught you before he went into the cold water off the Lowe Bank. Gulls fight over the gutting bins. Nobody on the quay says his name anymore, but everybody says the boats.

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By February the fleet is down to five hulls, and the Mary Ellen is the last to leave the harbour mouth. The swell lifts her in the dark and the warp runs out too fast over the stern roller. You see the loop snag, you see Tom's hand go to the cleat, and for a moment the rope lies across the deck in a shape you can't stop looking at, a loop folding back on itself, endless and stupid. You get your boot on the bight and hold it. Your palms burn for an hour after. You do not let go, and neither does he.

Back on the quay the skipper's wife, Marjorie Crane, chalks two words on the board outside the net loft because she says the sea likes its promises said out loud. Through, she writes first, then thick and thin in the careful capitals of someone who learned to read from ship's logs. You tell her it's an odd thing to write for a fishing fleet. She says it's the only thing a fleet ever needs to hear, and goes back inside, leaving the chalk on the ledge where the rain will take it by morning.