Close photograph of a small black and grey skull tattoo at the base of a finger, with a fading wavy line running along the finger.

Skull and wave line on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is held up with a small skull tattoo on the side of one finger, its eye sockets and teeth in dark ink with pale highlights. A thin, wavy black line runs from the skull along the finger and tapers into faded specks towards the fingertip. The shot is taken at close range against a softly blurred indoor background, with the tattoo in sharp focus.

Hand Skull Wave Line Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Odell had her father's rule: never take a thing the tide hasn't finished with. So when the spring tide pulled back from Porthgwidden and left a bone-white skull wedged in the wrack, she walked round it three times before she knelt. It was no bigger than a hazelnut, its eye holes stained the grey of wet slate, and someone, or the sea, had dabbed its teeth with tar.

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She carried it up to the bakehouse on Chapel Row, where Tomas Keast was scraping cooling trays. He turned it over under the lamp and laughed. 'Bet it's off the Mary Ellen,' he said. The Mary Ellen had gone down on the Runnel in 1931 with her Madeira and eleven men, and every February some fool swore he'd heard her bell out past the point.

That night the wind backed onshore and the sea came up the shingle in long thin lines, each one spilling wider, then sinking into spray. Nan sat by the range with the skull on the table and watched the lamplight shiver on its wet-looking crown. By morning the table was bare. The back step was dry, but a trail of salt specks ran from the door down to the water's edge, fading as it went, as if the sea had signed for it.

Tomas swore he hadn't touched it. Nan walked the tide-line anyway and found it smoothed flat, nothing left in the wrack but a single bone button and a fine dark thread of weed. She put the button in her pocket and did not walk round anything again.