Fine line tattoo of a half sun above three wavy horizontal lines on the upper arm, shown against a black sleeve.

Small sunset line tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a half sun sitting on three thin horizontal wavy lines, drawn in single black linework. The lines are delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink is a deep black against pale skin. The tattoo sits centrally on the outer upper arm, framed by a black sleeve at the top and a plain light background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun was down to half when Dad made me count the swells. Three long lines ran under it, he said, the way the water stacks before a blow. When the third line touched the bottom of the sun, we turned for Newlyn, whatever the skipper of the Mary Ellen was saying on the radio. I was eleven and sick over the rail most of that summer, but I learned the count.

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Thirty years later I had the wheel of my own boat, the Constance Rae, out past the Runnel Stone with eleven crates of mackerel in the hold and the breeze dropping. The fleet had gone in an hour before. Tomas, my deckhand, a lad from Penzance who talked more than the engine, wanted to know why we weren't running. I pointed west. The sun sat on the water like a coin pressed into wet sand, and I started to count.

The bottom edge met the first line, then the second. Tomas opened his mouth, and I raised a hand the way my father used to, and he shut it again. The third line caught the sun's rim and I spun the wheel. We ran home in the last of the light with the lamps lit and the sea gone the colour of pewter. The next morning the harbour master said the Mary Ellen had lost her nets off the Mount in a squall that came through at dusk. Nobody said my name, but I heard it all the same.

I still count when the light goes flat. Most evenings I get to three and stop, because the sun keeps its side of the bargain, and I have never once had to find out what happens when I don't.

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