Small fine line black tattoo of a bow on the inner wrist and forearm of a light-skinned arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small fine line bow on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline of a bow with two looped sides and trailing tails sits on the inner wrist, shown against a dark background. The single black line has a thin, even weight with slight variation, and there is no shading or fill. The tattoo is small and centred in the frame, with the arm filling most of the image.

Fine line Forearm Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's daughter tied the third bow before the boats had cleared the Carrick Rocks, two loops and two tails of blue ribbon knotted round the iron rail of the gallery. Her father said the lamp would do the work on its own, and so it would in clear weather, but the sea off Skerrow did not care for clear weather and had a way of taking the light and folding it into fog like a wet sheet.

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Agnes had learned the knot from her mother, who had learned it from a woman on the mainland whose husband never came back past the point. The rule was simple. A bow on the rail meant the keeper's house was watching. A boat that saw one could steer by the sound of the bell and not by its own fear. Agnes tied one each evening and untied it each morning, and in between she counted the boats in and counted them again.

On the night of the great fog the bell failed when its weight dropped down the stairwell, and her father went below to splice it in the dark. Agnes stayed at the rail with the lamp turning slow above her. Somewhere out past the rocks a horn answered nothing, then answered again, nearer. The Kestrel came in on the ribbon alone, and her skipper later swore he had seen two blue loops hanging in the murk like a pair of hands held up.

When the boats were all home the bow was still there, a little frayed, its tails stiff with salt. Agnes untied it and did not throw it away. She pressed it flat in her mother's almanac, between the pages for the month of the storm, and that night she tied a fresh one with longer tails, so that anyone coming in would know someone had been counting.