Pen sketch on grid paper of a looped, abstract seated figure with the word love in handwritten script beneath it, shown as a possible tattoo design.

Looped figure sketch with love script

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink pen sketch on squared paper shows an abstract seated figure made from interlocking loops, with a small rounded head and a wide trefoil-like base. The word love is written in looping cursive across the lower part of the drawing. The linework is uniform and monochrome, with no shading and the grid of the paper visible behind it.

Love Script Figure Loop Knot Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The loop-keeper of Cold Sallow had not stood up in nine winters, and the village had stopped asking her to. She sat on the seawall with her legs folded under her and a length of tarred cord running from her fingers out into the water, and every fisherman who rowed past the breakwater tied his boat to that cord before he tied it to anything else.

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The boy from drowned Pelling came in the week the spring tides turned. His brother's house was going under, he said, a foot a season, and he wanted the knot that would stop the sea. She laughed at him and drew a figure in the wet sand with one finger: a small round head at the top, a long loop for the body, and a wide base of three curls to bear everything else. Beside it she wrote the word love, because the old keepers said a knot without a name would slip its moorings. "The sea does not care what you call it," she said. "But your hands will remember."

He practised for eleven days with his brother's fishing line, and each evening the loops came undone in his lap. On the twelfth night a storm came up from the south-west and the house went under before he could reach it. He came back to the wall soaked and shouting, and she let him shout. Then she lifted the cord from her fingers and showed him the base. The third curl had never been there to hold the sea. It was there to take the weight of the other two, so the figure could sit still while everything around it moved.

He tied the cord around his own wrist and sat down beside her, folding his legs the way she did. The tide came in against the line all night and did not pull it free. In the morning the water stood at the first stone of the breakwater, and it stayed there.