Black and grey vertical tattoo on the side of a woman's torso above the hip, shown in a black bikini in shallow sea water.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small vertical tattoo on a woman's side in the sea

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black bikini stands waist-deep in clear sea water, with her face outside the frame. A small, thin black tattoo runs vertically along the side of her torso above the hip, with fine dark strokes that are too small to read clearly. The image is a cropped, daylight photograph with the water and sand in soft focus behind her.

Ribs Tattoo Bikini Sea Water Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The soundings had to be taken at slack water, Mr Okonedo always said, because a line dropped in a running tide lies to you. So I waited on the sandbar at Porthmellin every morning that August with the lead weight in my bag and a pencil behind my ear, while the sea came in clear as gin over the ribbed sand and the gulls argued about nothing.

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Mrs Ada Pengelly ran the survey office above the chandlery and owned the only ruler in three parishes that had never been bent. She gave me a column of figures on the first Monday and a rule: write each depth as a stroke, one stroke for every fathom, and never join them. "Charts are for people who have never been out in a boat," she said. "Keep the strokes apart so you can count them with your thumb."

By September I had sounded the channel eleven times and my tally sheet was black with those thin upright marks, row after row, until the paper looked like a fence in the rain. The mail boat captain laughed when he saw it and asked whether I meant to chart the harbour wall next. I told him I had only been counting what the water would give back.

The last sounding came on the equinox, when the tide stood so still the lead hung plumb as a bell rope. The line went down eleven fathoms and touched nothing I had expected. Mrs Pengelly drew the rest herself, and when the chart came back from the printers the channel was marked with a single stroke I had never made, deeper than any of mine, and beside it in her small hand: count again.