Fine line black script tattoo reading live with an arrow running through it, on the side of a finger.

Live script and arrow on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand resting on a grey patterned fabric, with a small tattoo on one finger. The word live is written in thin, cursive black script, with an arrow passing through the lettering, its shaft running left to right and its head pointing right. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the soft focus and dark vignette keep attention on the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, boy, and mind the tar on that bollard. No, not there, that's where Old Jack spat his teeth out in '58. Here. Now listen.

Keep reading

Ruth Penhallow had a hand like a bird's foot and she could mend a net faster than any man on the Newlyn quay. When her husband Tom took the Mary Jane out past the Runnel Stone in the autumn of '31 and didn't come back on the tide, she did not go down to the chapel to wail. She went to the net loft, took a tarred needle and a length of twine, and sat at the window until the light went.

Come spring, the net she was mending had a little knot in one corner, neat as a stitch, and when she held it up to the window there was a word worked into the mesh. Live. Not a prayer, mind. Just the one word, with an arrow driven through it, its shaft running out toward the open water, because that was the way Tom always pointed when he wanted the boys to pull harder.

Folk said she'd gone soft. She kept that net hung in the loft for years. Then one March morning the Mary Jane came limping in with her mainsail in ribbons, and Tom climbed the steps, grey as a gull, and asked where the devil his net had got to.

She never did tell him what she'd stitched in it. She just handed him the needle and told him to get on with it.

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