Small black looped symbol tattoo on skin

"Three turns and a tuck," he said, holding up the cord. The loops folded in on themselves like a heart with its tail curled underneath. Nell took the end from his fingers and drew it apart with one pull, and the whole thing slackened into a sigh. "Rope doesn't care what you hoped for. It cares whether the strands sit where they're meant to."

He sulked through the afternoon, splicing the same eye again and again while gulls argued on the roof. At dusk the fog rolled in off the bay, thick enough to swallow the breakwater light, and somewhere past the Mouse a crab boat was still out with its engine coughing. Nell lifted the coil from its peg without a word and walked down the wet steps to the quay, and Tom followed with his hands in his pockets.

She threw the line in a single practised arc. The bight she had made was neat and plain, nothing wished for in it, and the boatman caught it on the second try. The lamp swung toward the harbour mouth and held. When the boat came nosing in along the rope, Tom saw that the knot at the bollard was the one he had been fumbling all day, only tied the right way round.

Behind them, the chandlery window went dark, and Nell coiled the spare line over her arm as if she had always known it would come back to her.