Black fine line drawing of a continuous looping design with the script words you, me and in love, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Looping line with you, me and in love

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single continuous black line forms several loops and swirls on a plain white background. The words you, me and in love are written in small handwritten script at different points along the line. The composition is open and asymmetrical, with the line running from the top left down to a large loop at the bottom.

Fine line Lettering Swirl Loop Script Line

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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

You learn the rope walk before anything else in Scarrow Quay. Hester Venn tells you to stop watching the sea and watch your feet, because a line is only as honest as the hand that lays it. Every morning the gulls gather at the ropeworks door, and you sweep yesterday's fibres into the tar barrel while she hums a hymn she claims she doesn't know the words to.

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The commission arrives in October, pinned to a fisherman's cap by a boy who won't meet your eye. It asks for one length of tarred hemp, never cut, bent into loops like a child's drawing of a kite string. Tucked into the coil is a scrap of card with three words in pencil, pressed so hard they dent the paper. You, me, in love. Hester reads it twice and laughs. Nobody has ever ordered a sentence from her, she says, only knots.

You work for nine days. The line must run in one unbroken length, so you double back at every swirl and bind each crossing with a half hitch meant to outlast both of you. On the last night the wind swings south-west and the harbour bell rings with nobody pulling it. You carry the coil down to the slipway and find the boy already waiting, cap low.

He takes one end and walks it along the quay until the hemp runs taut between two bollards, then hands the other end back to you. Don't tie it off, he says. Leave the loose end for whoever comes next. You do. The tide creeps over the bottom loop and lifts it, and by morning the rope has gone soft and pale with salt, still one line from start to finish.