Black and grey dotwork tattoo of stylised hands around a star-shaped flower on an elbow, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised hands and flower on elbow

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs show the same tattoo on the outside of an elbow, one from the side and one from the front. The design is a pair of hands curving around a star-shaped flower motif, with a textured, rope-like form beneath. The shading is built from stippled dots and fine lines, with solid black areas along the outlines, and the ink is entirely black and grey.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The lock at Hatton Wharf has been stuck since Tuesday, so we have been tied up under the willows for three days now, and Dad has taken to sitting on the roof with his tea going cold beside him. I have been learning to tie the bowline properly, the one with the rabbit coming out of the hole, because he says a hitch that holds in the wet is worth more than a hundred words of advice. Each loop wants to close on itself and I keep having to start again.

The rope on the bow is older than either of us. It was your mother's, before she went to Leeds, and it has gone the colour of weak tea and the texture of a sheep's back. When the wind comes off the cut it lifts the coils, and I think of the old knots in the photographs Nan kept, the sailors' fists in them, all knuckle and cord.

Yesterday a lad from the next boat came along the towpath with a jam jar of wild flowers, starry white things with five points, and asked if we wanted them for the table. Dad said yes before I could answer. I put them in the jar with water from the can, and the petals kept their shape for hours, as if somebody had cut them out of paper and forgotten to fold them.

I'm posting this from the village so you'll have it before the end of the week. Tell Mum the stove is drawing again. Come up at Easter if the locks let you.

Love, Ada

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