Two small heart outline tattoos in black ink on the inner wrists, one drawn with a solid fine line and the other in a dotted line.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching heart outlines on two wrists

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists are pressed together, each with a small heart outline tattoo. The heart on the left is drawn with a solid, even fine line, while the heart on the right is formed from small dots. Both are black, and the warm-toned lighting gives the skin an orange cast.

Fine line Dotwork Other Heart Outline Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet at Skerrow went out before the gulls woke, and the women who stayed ashore mended whatever came back torn. Ada Pennock and her cousin Liss sat on the harbour wall with the net across their knees, and one night, with the tar smell thick on the wind, they made a bargain. Whoever sailed first would carry a mark of the other's, so the sea would have to ask twice before it took either of them.

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Liss went out first, on the Greta May, the spring the herring turned north. Ada heated a darning needle in the lamp chimney, dipped it in soot, and pricked a small heart on the inside of her wrist, pressing the line slow and even, because her mother had taught her that a steady hand keeps a net true. Liss had no lamp to work by. Out on the swell her hand jumped with every wave, so the heart she made on her own wrist came out as a ring of dots, each one a breath she had not managed to hold.

The fog came down on the third night. The fleet called home by bell and by lantern, and the Greta May answered neither. Ada sat on the wall with her wrist pressed to her chest and counted the dots she could not see, the way Liss would have counted knots. At dawn the other boats were already in, and still she waited, because the old women said a tale told at a wall was a tale that brings a boat back.

The Greta May came round the breakwater on the next tide, low in the water and heavy with fish. Liss stepped onto the stones and held out her wrist before she said a word. Ada held out hers. The solid line and the scatter of dots lay together like two rows of stitches meeting in the middle of a mesh, and the sea, which had been counting too, let them go.