Fine line black tattoo of a molecular structure with a six-sided ring, placed behind a person's ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Molecular structure tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo behind an ear, showing a six-sided ring with a chain of bonds and atoms extending upward, like a chemical diagram. The linework is thin and even, with solid dots at the joints, and the ink is crisp against the skin. The ear fills the right of the frame and the hair is out of focus on the left, with the tattoo placed near the centre.

Fine line Other Molecule Chemical structure Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mate had drawn it on the galley window with one finger, his breath fogging the glass so the lines came up white over the black sea. Six corners, a hexagon like a bolt head, and off one corner a little tail of bonds ending in a dot. Cal said the diesel we slopped on deck every morning had the same ring in it, and nobody on the Marigold believed him, because Cal also said the gulls were reporting our catch to the Norwegians.

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Our skipper, Ada Frew, had buried her husband two winters back and had not said his name since, so when the nets came up empty for nine days running she was the one who asked Cal to draw it again. He did, slower, with the tip of a gutting knife on the wet table, and said the dots were where the atoms held hands. Ada said the sea held hands with nobody. Still, she turned the boat south-east towards a bank the old men called the Sixpence, and the first haul came up heavy with hake.

Cal left at Christmas for college in Leeds. Before he went he gave me the knife and said to keep the ring in mind when the weather turned, because a thing that repeats itself is a thing you can trust. I laughed at him, and I still do, mostly. But on the last trip of the season, when the swell came up grey and the wheelhouse went dark, I found myself tracing that hexagon on the back of my glove, six corners and one hook, and feeling the hull settle under me.

We came in on the evening tide with the hold full and the fog lifting off the harbour wall. Ada stood at the rail watching the gulls. When I asked what she was looking for, she said only that Cal would want the ring painted on the fish boxes, and that she had decided to believe him about the gulls.