Black and white photo of a fine line heart with a looping curl tattoo on the back of a person's neck, below hair pulled up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single-line heart with curl on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck and head, with hair gathered up and away from the nape. A thin, single-line heart with a spiral curl extending from its upper right side sits at the centre of the neck. The image is in black and white, with soft lighting and a plain pale background that keeps focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Neck Heart Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold had been twelve days on the Sallow Cut when the spring flood tore her mooring free at Ferrier's Lock. Tamsin Reed found the tow line the next morning, wound back onto the bow cleat in a single curl that ran down from a loop, and she stood on the towpath turning the wet end over in her hands.

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"It's the flood," her son Elias said. "Water rolls rope about."

"Water doesn't tie a knot like that." She had kept that line thirty years and knew every hitch the river could make. The old bargemen said a curled line meant someone had stood on the bank holding the other end, and had not let go until the water came up to their boots.

They walked the cut to the lock house. Ivy Ferrier was sixteen, the keeper's granddaughter, and she had sat on the gate every evening since March, watching for a narrowboat called the Wren that never came back up from Hobb's Weir. When Tamsin showed her the rope, the girl went pale and then red, and said nothing at all. Tamsin didn't ask. She took the curl between her thumbs, drew it round once more into a closed loop, and pulled it tight against the bollard so the shape sat there like a little heart the river had drawn for her.

The Marigold went on down to the tideway that week. Nobody knew who tied the rope on the bollard after that, but the lock keepers still say a boat that finds one waiting on the cut is meant to take it on.