Black and white photo of a hand resting on a striped top, with thin black fine line bands tattooed around the middle finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Thin black bands on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up of a hand resting on a striped top, with a silver ring on one finger. Thin black lines that appear to be tattooed bands wrap around the middle finger near the knuckle. The image is monochrome and the composition is tight on the hand and fingers.

Fine line Hand Band Line Hand Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cord had gone stiff with salt by the time the Mary Ellen raised the Azores, but Mr Pardoe would not let anyone cut it from the marlinspike. Forty-one days out of Bristol, and every one of them had a turn of tarred twine wound round the spike's shaft, each band pressed tight against the last, so the wood looked striped like a humbug sweet.

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I was thirteen and cabin boy, and I took it for superstition, the way some men would not whistle aboard. I asked him once what the bands were for. He spat over the rail and said they were a count, not a prayer, and I should mind my own watch.

On the forty-second morning he came up without his coat and sat on the hatch with the spike across his knees. He unwound one band slowly, the way you'd unpick a bad seam, then wound it again looser and tied it off. 'Sixty miles to the Bristol buoy,' he said, 'and not one of them mine to count.' He handed me the spike. The last band was the only one not pressed tight, and the twine had a faint blue thread in it, the sort a seamstress uses to mark a hem.

I have it still, hung on a nail above my bunk ashore. The loose turn has never once been tightened.