Black and grey close-up photograph of a small outlined tattoo behind an ear, with a silver hoop piercing in the ear above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small outlined shape behind the ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of an ear with loose hair around it, showing a small black outlined tattoo on the skin behind the ear. The tattoo appears to be a simple loop or heart-like shape drawn in a clean, thin line. A silver hoop sits in the cartilage of the ear, and the image is in black and white.

Other Ear Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun had taught Ruth to tie a bowline with her eyes shut, and by the third week out of Liverpool she could do it in the dark with the Atlantic slamming against the rail. The loop was the thing, he said. Everything hangs on the eye. Make it small and neat and it will hold a man's weight for a lifetime.

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Her brother's ring had come off in the hold, caught in a coil of manila he had been splicing. Nobody saw it go. Ruth found it in the bilge strainer a day later, a plain silver band no wider than a fingernail, and she kept it threaded on waxed twine inside her collar because the mate would not allow jewellery on deck.

Off the Grand Banks the swell came up under them like a hand. The new chandler, a man called Pell who smoked clay pipes and counted everything twice, watched her tie off a stay in the rising wind and said nothing until the sea had gone flat again. Then he asked where a girl had learned a knot that neat. She told him the sea had taught her, and that her brother had taught her the sea.

At Halifax she slid the ring onto a belaying pin on the quay, lashed a bowline through it, and walked up the gangway without looking back. The eye was small, and it held.