Fine line black cross tattoo on the upper back and a small dot tattoo on the side of the waist, shown in a sports bra.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross and dots on the side torso

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a grey and orange sports bra and navy leggings, cropped below the face, shows a small black cross on her upper back near the shoulder blade. On her side near the waist is a tiny cluster of dots or short marks in black ink. The candid phone photo includes a shaker bottle and earphones, and the tattoos are simple, delicate linework.

Fine line Back Ribs Cross Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Marigold Rose ever told me why Skipper kept the dots. He had a stub of carpenter's pencil on a string, and every time we came in past the Spurn with the hold full, he put one small dot on the inside of the wheelhouse door, low down where the paint had gone soft. Forty years of that and the door looked like a page of sea spray.

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I asked him once, the week after the Christmas gale, when we were two hands short and the net kept fouling on the wreck off Dogger. He didn't look up from the tide tables. "Hauls," he said. "Every one that came home."

The cross was older than me, scratched into the rail by the winch with a marlinspike, just forward of the place Teddy Coyle went over in '79. Nobody talked about it. We stepped round it with our boots. When the new lad, Kieran, asked what it was for, the bosun said it was where you grabbed hold when the deck went to glass, and that was all anyone needed to know.

In March we came in with a hold so light the buyers laughed at us, and Skipper sat on an upturned fish box on the quay watching the gulls. I expected him to reach for the pencil. Instead he held it out to me. "Put one on for the Coyle lad," he said. "He never got his dot." I made it small and neat beside the oldest mark on the door, then walked up to my mum's with the wind at my back and ate a hot dinner I didn't have to pay for.