Small black fine line tattoo of a cross made from looping strokes on the inner wrist, shown in a close photograph.

Looped cross on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small cross formed from continuous looping black strokes sits on the inner wrist, with the skin and the edge of the hand visible above it. The linework is thin and even, with the loops crossing at the centre to form the shape. The tattoo is in black ink on light skin, and the plain background is a wooden surface.

Fine line Forearm Cross Loop Infinity

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Keep the strand turning, Lysa, or the whole length goes slack at the join." My father said it every morning at the rope-walk beyond the Ostian gate, where the wind off the salt pans tugged at the hemp as we fed it backwards down the long shed. He had learned the trick from his own father: never cut a cord to begin a new one. You lay the fresh fibre alongside the old, bind the two with a few turns of tarred twine, and keep walking.

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I thought it a fussy habit until the autumn the grain ship went down in a squall off the mole. The sailors who staggered back to the yard had lost their rigging in the same wreck, and every rope they showed us had been joined with ends, knotted and spliced and knotted again. The only line that held was a hawser my father had laid for the harbour master, one length walked from the spool to the bollard without a break. When the men hauled it up from the water, the other cords fell apart at every knot, but that one came up whole, still dripping, its loops lying in the mud like a sum that had come out right.

After the funeral I went back to the shed alone and tried to lay a cord from memory. My first attempts crossed over themselves in a tangle I was ashamed of. Then I drew the shape in the wet dust with one finger, a cross made of loops, the lines passing through the centre and returning without ever lifting from the ground. Where does it start, I asked the empty shed. Nowhere, I answered in his voice. That is the point. I took up the spool, tied the new fibre to the old with tarred twine, and walked the rope down the shed without cutting it.