Black and grey spider web tattoo with shaded strands, shown on the outer arm near the elbow.

Spider web tattoo on the elbow

Geometric · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded spider web fills the outer arm, with its radiating strands and curved rings drawn in solid black outline. The web has grey gradient shading that gives each section depth, and a small reddened area sits at its centre. The skin tone is the only other colour, and the photograph is taken against a plain indoor background.

Geometric Other Spider web Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net had to be whole before the lamps were lit, so I sat on the quay with the shuttle going in and out of the mesh and counted knots the way my father taught me. Each one was a fish we had not yet caught, he used to say, and each one held the net a little tighter against the bad weather. My fingers were raw from the salt and I had stopped trying to feel them.

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Old Eudora watched from her doorway above the salt sheds, a bowl of lentils in her lap. She told me a spider does not build from the edge inward. It throws a single thread across the gap, then another, then drops from the middle and draws the rings out in circles, so the centre is the first thing made and the last thing finished. I laughed and said a spider had no harbour master to answer to, and no widow in the next street asking when her husband's boat would come home.

That night the wind came off the water and tore the eastern mole open. By morning two boats were gone and the rest lay on their sides like dropped shoes. Eudora was already down on the stones, kneeling in the wet beside the wreck of the old drying net, which had hung between two posts for as long as anyone remembered. The centre of it was still whole, and tied into the first knot was a scrap of red wool she had put there the year I was born.

She did not speak. She only held out the shuttle. I took it and worked outward from the red knot, one ring at a time, while the gulls came down to watch and the tide climbed the steps. When the last strand was pulled taut the sun was over the headland, and the net shone grey and perfect in the light, the way a thing does when it has been finished by someone who knew where it began.