Black fine line tattoo of dashed lines radiating from a central point, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Radiating dashed lines on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a central point with many thin lines radiating outwards in different directions, each built from short dashed segments. The linework is fine and black, with no shading, and the lines vary in length to create a starburst shape. It sits across the side of the torso and fills the view against plain skin.

Fine line Geometric Ribs Starburst Radiating lines Dashes Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire came into the Lerwick office at four in the afternoon, the hour the gulls gave up on the harbour wall. Mr Halloran had left me the key, a stack of bearings on buff paper, and a note in his square hand: send them in the order given and do not tidy the spelling. The boats had gone out at first light, eleven of them, and each had a bearing from the hut at Sumburgh Head that sent it fanning away from the others like the spokes of a cart wheel.

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I tapped them out one by one. Dash, dash, dot, a long pause while the sea took the signal and gave nothing back. By dusk I had answers from nine boats, short replies, all of them the same tired word: fish. The tenth reply was only a number. The eleventh did not come at all, and the number I had been sent for it was the one I kept returning to, because nobody had written it on the sheet. It was in the margin, in pencil, a line of dashes with no dots between, the way a man might count off the spokes of something he could not see properly in the fog.

I sent it anyway, the same as he would have. Then I sat with my hand on the key and listened to the hum of the instrument until the lamp in the lighthouse swept over the glass. At half past nine the coastguard cutter answered from the north with a single word, found, and at ten the boat came in under its own sail, slow and dripping, the man at the tiller raising one hand as if to say he had heard the knock on the door.