Small black fine line fish hook tattoo on the outer ankle, with a woven bracelet in red, blue and white above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small fish hook tattoo on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single small fish hook is drawn in black ink on the outer ankle, with a curved shank and barb at the lower end. The linework is thin and the hook is mostly solid, with some softer grey tones along the bend. A woven bracelet in red, blue and white sits above the tattoo, and the dark background sits behind the skin.

Fine line Ankle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down and mind the lamp, because I'll tell this once and no more. Thomas Gale made hooks in the loft over the net shed at Gullhaven, heating the wire until it went the colour of a winter sunset before he hammered the barb. Nobody in the village ever saw him make one smaller than a fingernail. He said the sea didn't need them small. He said a small hook was for a small thing that needed catching.

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The girl Ada climbed his stairs the March the herring failed. Her father had taken the Brightwater out past the Skerries and not come back by the Tuesday. She asked Thomas for a hook. He asked what she meant to catch, and she said she wanted to catch the boat and bring it home. He sat up all night with a file and a magnifying glass, working a bend no bigger than a barley grain, and he gave it to her on a loop of blue and red thread without taking a penny.

She tied it to the rail of her bedstead and walked the shingle every morning after that, in all weathers, while the other wives sat indoors with the kettle. Eleven days on, the fog lifted and there was the Brightwater, low in the water and trailing one torn sail, coming round the headland as if someone were towing her. Her father stepped onto the slip sunburned and cursing the wind, and he swore on his mother's grave the hook had drawn him through the fog like a line through a dark pool.

Ada still walks the shingle, and the gulls know her by the tiny hook she wears on her thread. Thomas never charged for the small ones, and he never made another as fine.