Small black fine line tattoo of a heart with a curling tail and a few sweeping lines, on skin at what appears to be the top of the foot or hand.

Small heart and swirl line tattoo

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single-needle style black outline shows a heart shape joined to a spiralling curl, with two or three sweeping lines to the left that suggest an abstract figure or creature. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the design sits centrally in the frame against slightly reddened skin. The image is a close, straight-on shot with soft lighting.

Fine line Other Heart Swirl Abstract Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gull had been following the trawler since Tuesday, and by Thursday Eamon Tulloch had decided it was the boat's own bad luck come back for a second look. He told the deckhands so over tea in the wheelhouse, and Morag laughed, but she was watching the bird too, the way it tilted its head at the nets as if it were counting them.

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We hauled the last of the cod at dusk, the sea gone the colour of pewter and the lamps coming on one by one along the harbour wall at Scrabster. The catch was poor. I stood at the rail with my hands stinging from the cold rope and thought about my father, who had sailed the same grounds for thirty years and never once come home with less than he needed. He used to say the fish came to a man who kept his heart open to the water. I had always taken that for the sort of thing old men say.

It was the swell that changed everything. A loose buoy came sliding across the deck in the dark, and I went over the side after it without thinking, the way you do when you are young and the cold has not yet got into your bones. Morag hauled me back by the collar. Eamon swore at me for a fool. The gull was perched on the gunwale when I looked up, and it did not fly away, only turned its small grey head and watched me shiver.

I still have the mark from that night, a little curl of ink on the inside of my ankle where the rope burned through my sock. Eamon says it looks like a swirl of smoke, Morag says a sleeping cat. To me it is only the gull's curved neck and the heart my father used to draw on the steamed windows, and the sea, which let me go.