Small fine black and red interlocking loop tattoo on the inside of a wrist, photographed in close up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlocking black and red loops on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of two interlocking loops sits on the inside of a wrist, with one loop drawn in black and the other in red. The linework is smooth and continuous, with the red section crossing over and under the black outline. The background is a dark textured surface, and the skin is lit evenly against the darker tones around it.

Forearm Knot Abstract Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mooring line had frayed at the eye again, and Maud Tennant stood on the boarding house steps holding it up to the grey light as though it had let her down personally. Behind her the kettle screamed in the kitchen and somebody's breakfast was going cold. Frank Oddie came up the path with his cap in one hand and a coil of red twine in the other, which was not something a retired ferryman carried by accident.

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He sat on the bottom step and picked the old splice apart with his thumbnail while she held the rope taut. The black cord was tarred hemp, stiff as wire, the same stuff that had hung off the pier since before either of them came to Hollow Bay. He worked the red through the lay in two loops, over and then under, the way you would thread a shoelace through a stranger's fingers. Each time the line crossed itself the red rode on top, then slid beneath the black, so that neither colour could be pulled loose without the other giving way.

'Does that have a name?' she asked. 'Sailors call it a lover's knot when they want to sell it to a girl,' Frank said, not looking up. 'The rest of us call it a knot that doesn't care which way the wind is blowing.' She had heard the joke from him before, in exactly that tone, and she had never once asked him to say it twice.

When the splice was finished he hauled the line hard from both ends and nothing gave. Maud carried it down the steps and knotted it through the iron ring on the gatepost, drawing the loops closed until they sat snug against each other. Out past the harbour wall a gull let go of the wind and dropped onto the water. She left the rope where it was and went in to rescue the breakfast.