Two fine line tattoos of a mother holding a child: a wrist design with two small red hearts and flowing lines below, and a black outline design on the upper back.

Mother and child line tattoos on wrist and upper back

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The image shows two photographs of mother and child tattoos. The left shows a wrist design of a seated woman with long flowing hair cradling a small child, with two red hearts above and flowing lines below. The right shows a black outline of a woman holding a child close on the upper back, with no colour and simple, unshaded linework.

Fine line Forearm Back Mother Child Heart Silhouette Hair Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already turned when Maud dragged the boat up over the shingle, and the baby was asleep in the crook of her arm, wrapped in the oilcloth she kept for the pots. Ned was still bailing behind her, swearing softly at the bilge, and the gulls had gone quiet on the harbour wall the way they did before weather.

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Old Tamsin at the chandlery had a saying about the sea taking its due. Maud had never believed it until the winter the child came, when the water seemed to lean closer to the steps each night, as if it were listening. Some evenings she sat on the wall with her hair loose down her back and sang the net song her mother had sung, and the little waves would fold over the stones and fall back, quiet as a cat.

The fog came in on a Thursday, thick as wool, with Ned still out past the Mouls. Maud could not see the lamp on the point or the red buoy beyond it. She walked to the end of the wall with the baby on her hip and sang until her throat ached. Somewhere out in the grey a bell answered, then a voice, then the dark shape of the hull sliding in beside her with the madder hearts she had painted on its bow still bright.

Ned climbed the steps wet to the elbow and said nothing about the fog. The child had a fist wound tight in a strand of Maud's hair, and when she eased it loose, the hair ran out over the stones in a long dark line that trailed down the steps into the water and stayed there, unfurling, until the next wave came and took it. Maud pulled the rest back over her shoulder and did not ask what she had paid. The sea kept its own book, and she had seen her name in it.